LSI RAID Controller help, 2308 chip on-board ASRock Extreme 11 motherboard is slow!

[Zybane]

Request some help for those who know about the LSI controllers. Using the 2308 controller chip found on the ASRock Extreme 11 motherboard and I have eight 128 GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD's (Firmware 1.5) set up in RAID 0.


This is the very poor speed I am getting:







This is the speed I got with a mere two 128 GB Vertex 4's on Z77 Intel Raid 0:









Both are 64kb stripe.


Pretty much the only speed that looks correct on the LSI setup is the 4k read and Acc.time's. Everything else look's very slow. The 4k write is abysmal, and the sequential speed is far far below what eight M4's got here using the same controller chip (4180 MB/s seq read):


First Look: LSI's SAS 9207-8i PCIe 3.0 HBA - The SSD Review




These are the settings:





















Now in that last screenshot above, it shows disk cache enabled (which doesn't effect the speed with before and after change runs), read policy to none, write policy: write through.


But when I go to change any of those items by right clicking the virtual drive properties, you can see the window, the only option is disk cache policy.


According to this site: How to enable write back cache (write cache) on MegaRAID controllers.


There are a lot more options there that I don't have. What gives?


Anyone have a clue why this performance is so poor?


Am I suppose to buy some of this software for hundreds and hundreds of dollars located here: LSI Online Store - Advanced Software Options


Just to get my LSI controller speed working properly? :eek:

[Zybane]

Re: LSI RAID Controller help, 2308 chip on-board ASRock Extreme 11 motherboard is slow!

Below are screen shots of how ASRock implemented this chip and how I configured it in RAID.








The BIOS of the ASRock motherboard is P1.10.


I take it the configuration utility in my screen shots is HBA and not WebBIOS?


I noticed under the MegaRAID utility it doesn't allow me to change the write policy and keeps it write-through. Is there a way to force that to write back? (I have a UPS for the computer, but the motherboard LSI chip does not have a battery backup). I only have one option (Disk Cache Policy) and not all of the options as found here:


How to enable write back cache (write cache) on MegaRAID controllers.


Under MegaRAID my settings are: Access Policy- Read/Write, Disk Cache Policy- Enabled (only settings I can change), Read Policy- No read ahead, IO Policy- Direct IO, Write Policy- Write Through.


Also, in the BIOS configuration utility there is absolutely nowhere to change the stripe size during volume create. Is this on purpose? It only uses the default 64kb. Some say that my low performance may be because I am not using 128kb stripe, but I highly doubt that as 64kb has done really well in mixed-use scenarios in recent RAID tests versus other stripe sizes.