HP SmartArray P400, poor performance?

 

HP SmartArray P400, poor performance?

February 25th, 2009 juergens Leave a comment Go to comments

 

You got a HP SmartArray P400 Raid Controller and you are struggling with a horrible bad write performance over ethernet? Perhaps you tried already to enable the write cache to get rid of this but wondered why nothing changed and your Raid5 with SAS10k drives is slower than burning a cd. Furthermore you could ask yourself why the hell is the accelerating ratio at 100%read/0%write?

I couldn’t believe, but HP sell Raidcontroller in e.g. a DL380G5 without battery! So you could activate your write cache a thousand times, but your driver won’t use it because there is no backing up battery. As a result you stuck at rates below 10MB/sec and furthermore Win2k8 reacts with a Bluescreen after transfering about 2GB. Nice….

So get a battery upgrade for your controller and be happy with transferrates you expect from such a system.

2 options:
Battery-backed write cache upgrade:  383280-B21 is about 100$
512MB Battery-backed write cache upgrade: 405148-B21 is about 350$

on some HP sites you can read, if you have a P400/256MB you need an extra 24″ cable to install. With the Battery-backed write cache upgrade you get a ~7″ cable, and hey, it’s fitting far better in my DL380G5… What a surprise!

I choosed the Battery only package and now i got rates about 60-70MB/s in writing, perhaps the memory upgrade will rise this rates a little bit.

There are several threads in the HP forum and of course, hotline didn’t say to get the upgrade.
http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/home.do