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TechNut
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Re: Suggestions? DIY SSD RAID on HP DL380 G5 w/P400i

Tue Feb 05, 2013 10:20 pm

** Do not take this as Official HP Support **

If the drive shows up with temperature and all of the features, it is working as intended in the array. From what I can tell, you have the same info. as my other SSD's show in the DL360 G5 I have.

The DL380G5 is a PCIe 1.0 machine, and it will be very much bandwidth and performance limited. You will be limited to PCIe 1.0 x4 performance (10Gpbs), which is enough to run a few drives off of the internal card. To go to the 410i or others, you will need to get some adapter cables to transition the older SAS/backplane connectors to the Mini-SAS format. I know others have done this. But you will need to find those cables, which is not easy! You will be stuck at the 10Gpbs speed, with no real benefit in changing it over.

I would not replace the card for just temperature readings though. Officially, the P410i is not supported in the DL380G5, meaning, HP does not test or validate it will work. It also means that the 410i and the DL380G5 are a untested combo, and well, its buyer or tinkerer beware. That has not stopped me from hacking up a few machines, as it was/is a fun learning exercise.

My best advice on using the current P400 you have, it make sure you are fully patched to the latest and greatest BIOS, P400 and Disk Drive firmwares. I know the 7.22 firmware on the P400 works great with SSD's, just you do not get any TRIM support.

HTH!
 
Scrotos
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Re: Suggestions? DIY SSD RAID on HP DL380 G5 w/P400i

Wed Feb 06, 2013 4:14 pm

I think I'll skip doing a P410 transplant, then, thanks for the info. Right now I'm down to figuring out how best to benchmark this bad boy and see what performance I'm losing going from RAID 6 to RAID 5 to 10. And I guess I'll tweak the cache settings on the P400 as per HP's SSD recommendations.
 
Scrotos
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Re: Suggestions? DIY SSD RAID on HP DL380 G5 w/P400i

Wed Feb 20, 2013 4:56 pm

TechNut, any guidance on upgrading the cache from 256 MB to 512 MB? Does it make much of a difference? And suggestions on stripe sizes to use with SSDs? I'm not finding much info on SSDs in RAIDs.
 
Scrotos
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Re: Suggestions? DIY SSD RAID on HP DL380 G5 w/P400i

Wed Feb 27, 2013 3:05 pm

Point of interest. Migrating 8 x 146 GB SAS drives from RAID 6 to RAID 5 to RAID 0 and changing the stripe sizes isn't too bad. A few hours, a day at most for doing that with high priority transformation in the SmartArray controller settings.

Migrating 8 x 256 GB SSD drives? Horribly slow. RAID 6 to RAID 5 was something like 20 hours. Ok, not too bad. Migrating RAID 6 stripe from 128k to 256k took 4 or 5 days. Migrating RAID 5 stripe from 512k to 8k seems like it'll be the same. The RAID 6 stripe was done with 256 MB of BBWC and the RAID 5 stripe going on now is with 512 MB of BBWC, doesn't seem to have made much difference. 5% transformation in 3 hours. Hrm. At 60 hours maybe it IS faster with either the bigger cache.

The larger cache yielded performance improvements when I tested SAS RAID 0 with a 25% read/75% write cache bias, but something in the 1 to 3 percent range. With the SSD RAID 6 with a 100% read bias the improvement was around 10 percent under load.

In the interest of time, I don't foresee being able to test other 256 vs 512 MB cache scenarios.
 
Scrotos
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Re: Suggestions? DIY SSD RAID on HP DL380 G5 w/P400i

Tue Apr 16, 2013 10:54 am

Here are my test results, for anyone interested: http://screenshots.rq3.com/monk/iometer ... 5-ssd.xlsx

Testing methodology is as outlined in this thread: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=86757

There is a sheet named SSD-All devoted to running ALL the iometer benchmarks that would work on the SSD RAID 1+0 system. Most other results are database-only. For the SSD vs. SAS tests, this is the configuration used:

Storage tested:
256 GB Samsung 840 Pro SATA
146 GB 15K 6G DP SAS 512547-S21

Systems tested:
HP DL380 G5 458565-001, P56 5/2/2011 firmware
2 x Xeon E5430 2.66 GHz
32 GB RAM
P400i 256 & 512 MB BBWC, 7.24 firmware
8 x 146 GB 15K 6G DP SAS 512547-S21
8 x 256 GB Samsung 840 Pro SATA

More details are under the Analysis sheet.

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