@MattSpeller said:
@creayt ohhhhhhhhhhhhh ok - that was messing with my brain. thank you for clarification.
NP.
I should note in case it matters that it's a quad 3.8 Ghz Xeon w/ HT and 32 GB DDR3 1600.
My dual-core i7-5500U w/ 8GB of RAM puts these up w/ a single 840 Evo though, notice the awkwardly spectacular 6GB write.
@MattSpeller said:
@creayt said:
What RAID level is giving you those numbers?
The 1:10 Sequential ratio seems really wrong.
That's literally a SINGLE 850 Pro 256 GB using the box's RAM as a write back cache ( Samsung's "rapid mode" ).
PXE-E05: The LAN adapter's NVM configuration is corrupted or has not been initialized.
Is this normal? It seems to boot fine, but booting takes a hot minute so I wonder if it's holding it up. I disabled the 4 network slots from the boot sequence hoping it'd bypass any kind of PXE check, but didn't help.
![2015-07-09_1656[1].png](https://i.imgur.com/OmNjaXr.png)
@anonymous said:
What do you name your servers?
We have a very small pool of servers ( less than 15 ) and use fun names based on their overall prowess or any unique characteristics.
Goliath
Ares
Achilles
Cheetara
Sanctuary
@MattSpeller said:
Having trouble upvoting posts, posting images, all sorts of stuff. Am I alone on this one? Have y'all fed the server hamster lately?
Same. I've had 8/9 of my image embeddings/uploads fail. It did work once though. Also posts are half-rendering intermittently but reloading fixes.
@scottalanmiller said:
Now if the only goal is speed, your priorities change. So if you really just care about how fast it can go, you look at things differently.
I see. I guess it makes sense at least w/ my limited knowledge of how it all works. If a single 850 Pro using system RAM as the write cache can pull off the numbers below on my home-made $1000 workstation ( over 4 GB/s read and write ), and my server has 256GB RAM for Storage Spaces to use, I imagine the hardware RAID wouldn't stand a chance. The risk of data loss is very scary though, and may end up being the deciding factor. Out of curiosity, were the data loss issues you saw pre Server 2012 era or post?
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
I see. So in general is software RAID for specifically SSD deployments superior to a humble controller like a Perc H710P because of these features then? Or should the hardware RAID still be better independent of these things?
Software RAID and hardware RAID only refers to where the RAID is implemented. But there are commonalities. Hardware RAID's purpose is two-fold: one to fix the problems with Windows software RAID and two to make things easy so that you don't need to be a storage expert.
With the exception of Windows software RAID, software RAID in any enterprise OS crushes hardware RAID and has since 2002 (when 133 FSB Pentium III was standard.) Software RAID is faster and more powerful, but requires more work and knowledge. For the SMB market where performance rarely matters and ease of use matters a lot, hardware RAID really wins. Any, of course, anytime you run Windows you want hardware RAID because of the fragility in Windows software RAID.
But in the enterprise space (big iron servers) hardware RAID has never even existed. Hardware RAID has existed solely for the purpose of solving issues with Windows.
This is mind blowing, I had no idea. Unfortunately I need to stick w/ Windows for the foreseeable future at least as I'm just now dipping into servers myself and this is for a personal project ( new web app I'm creating ). Very informative, thank you.
@scottalanmiller said:
And we've seen people lose data from Storage Spaces failing, so this isn't just theory.
Ah, I see. That's kind of what I'm looking for. What happened to cause the data loss? Random failure?
@scottalanmiller said:
If Ford renamed the Pinto the "Grand Tourer" would you just buy it? What if they added a new color scheme? This is the storage industry's Pinto with a new coat of paint and a new brand name. MS is making an effort, but we can't be blinded by a good advertising campaign and forget what it is underneath.
That seems to kind of dismiss the ability of software to be re-engineered to dramatically different effect. I know that I've gone back into an algorithm I created years earlier, tweaked, reorganized, and optimized it, and got 50000%+ better performance out of the update than its original writing had. Is that the wrong way to think about software RAID? Why couldn't Microsoft theoretically write some amazing code that made it way way way faster than it ever had been before?
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
Since it picks up all of the fumbles the H710 Perc makes: Trim support, guaranteed per-drive overprovisioning, winning in Crystal benchmarks ( so far ).
You are just describing software RAID. Nothing special here.
I see. So in general is software RAID for specifically SSD deployments superior to a humble controller like a Perc H710P because of these features then? Or should the hardware RAID still be better independent of these things?
According to my understanding of Anandtech's review you can just completely transform performance on these 850 Pro drives particularly by ensuring proper overprovisioning, which I'd seem to lose at this point w/ the hardware RAID.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8216/samsung-ssd-850-pro-128gb-256gb-1tb-review-enter-the-3d-era/7
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Storage spaces is nothing new, its just a rebranding and is fragile at best.
Fragile how? It's putting up some pretty hardcore numbers in Crystal so far and has worked seemingly flawlessly on my workstation w/ an unsettling Frankenstein of old laptop drives, a few 7200 3.5"s, and a... wait for it.... thumb drive in a Raid 0 equivalent.
20 years of being the bane of the storage industry. It's the reason that hardware RAID exists. Windows software RAID is famously the last resort for those who can't afford hardware RAID but can't risk doing nothing. It famously underperforms and falls apart.
I think we're talking about two different things here. Well, I hope we are.
We are talking about Storage Spaces. There is only one thing.
Oh ok. But when I create a software RAID in disk manager it's a lot different/simpler than the Storage Spaces way where you create pools, volumes, columns, etc.
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Storage spaces is nothing new, its just a rebranding and is fragile at best.
Fragile how? It's putting up some pretty hardcore numbers in Crystal so far and has worked seemingly flawlessly on my workstation w/ an unsettling Frankenstein of old laptop drives, a few 7200 3.5"s, and a... wait for it.... thumb drive in a Raid 0 equivalent.
20 years of being the bane of the storage industry. It's the reason that hardware RAID exists. Windows software RAID is famously the last resort for those who can't afford hardware RAID but can't risk doing nothing. It famously underperforms and falls apart.
I think we're talking about two different things here. Well, I hope we are.
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
Next big decision is whether to use the hardware raid controller or some sexy Storage Spaces strategy. Stay tuned for a separate thread.
Since when is Windows software RAID sexy? Ewwww
Since it picks up all of the fumbles the H710 Perc makes: Trim support, guaranteed per-drive overprovisioning, winning in Crystal benchmarks ( so far ). I guess. Still trying to figure this all out so it may be a fool's errand. Just to be clear I'm not talking about the vanilla software RAID you can do in disk manager, this is something totally different.
Does anyone use Spaces in production? I'm getting semi-close read speeds in a 4x 850 Pro SSD Raid 0 using Storage Spaces and far superior write speeds ( expected ) when compared to a 6x identical-drive Raid 10 using the Perc H710P ( 1GB cache ) on my recently deployed server, and trying to decide whether to do a big Raid 10 of all 10 SSDs or to do a 2-drive Raid 1 and an 8 drive Raid 10 using Storage Spaces after getting some disappointing performance w/ the current Raid 10 setup on it.
@MattSpeller said:
That sounds terrible man. You should send it to me and get yourself something higher end. I can't believe you use that! I'll happily pay for postage, as a friend, so you don't have to pay to recycle it.
God you're right, it's in the mail.
Don't get too jealous, the procs are
http://ark.intel.com/products/64583/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2680-20M-Cache-2_70-GHz-8_00-GTs-Intel-QPI
and max out at 3.5 Ghz( albeit w/ a 20 MB cache ).
@MattSpeller said:
Did you get the SSD RAID allocation stuff sorted? I think I missed the outcome of that thread
It turns out the datacenter configuring the original 6 SSDs into a Raid 10 demolished the over-provisioning ( you have to manually set the RAID to use less than the full capacity, neither they nor I knew that ) and so I'm at a point where I'm starting over w/ it. I now have to weigh
w/
Still in the research phase at this point, but yeah, the original strategy fell apart because overprovisioning works implicitly and the RAID controller destroys it, in other words when you configure the provisioning you do so by creating your main partition, and then leaving the rest unallocated, and the Samsung 840/850s just know to use any unallocated space for speed and durability.
@thecreativeone91 said:
Storage spaces is nothing new, its just a rebranding and is fragile at best.
Fragile how? It's putting up some pretty hardcore numbers in Crystal so far and has worked seemingly flawlessly on my workstation w/ an unsettling Frankenstein of old laptop drives, a few 7200 3.5"s, and a... wait for it.... thumb drive in a Raid 0 equivalent.
@MattSpeller said:
R620? nice box - you can safely ignore my post about overclocking though heheh
I'll check out that post as I start to build my new rig though for sure!
The R20 is pretty sick.
2 Xeon octacores
256 GB DDR3 1600
10x 1 TB Samsung 850 Pros
Wish I could use it as a local workstation 
@MattSpeller said:
In all honesty I think you'll get more performance gains by tweaking the OS than you will in the BIOS of a server.
Totally agree. Don't worry, I'm going to tweak EVERRYYYYYTHINNNNNGGGGG.
Next big decision is whether to use the hardware raid controller or some sexy Storage Spaces strategy. Stay tuned for a separate thread.
@scottalanmiller said:
So you are saying that it is HyperV that you using? I'm unclear here.
HyperV is a type 1 hypervisor, it is all on or all off. There is no "virtual" and "non-virtual" concept. Only one thing can run on Intel or AMD bare metal. So if you disable HyperV, it's gone and you are 100% bare metal for the OS.
No, sorry, I'm saying I'm starting over from scratch and going to do a fresh install of 2012 R2 on an R620, and I'm just scanning the bios, in the processor settings specifically where you can toggle things enabled or disabled ( like "virtualization technology", "hardware prefetcher", "DCU IP prefetcher", etc. ) and wondering whether ticking virtualization technology ( support ) to disabled will somehow free up the processor to go at full throttle or offer any other advantages.
Thanks guys.
