16 x 256GB Samsung 830 SSD Raid 6 with LSI 9266-8i Controller in a Dell R720 (16 Bay)
As a systems administrator it seems like I’m constantly battling IO contention and latency in our san and local storage environments. So As months roll by these new SSD drives keep getting cheaper and cheaper, offering better write wear and longer life spans for high write intensive environments, so finally I’m taking the plunge to begin converting our most intensive systems over to solid state.
In the process of exploring solid state disk the samsung 256GB 830 series really stuck out of the crowd. The 830 offers fantastic read and write latency and throughput as well as being one of the only SSD series on the market where both the flash and storage controller are by the same manufacture.
The main reason for chosing the samsung is this benchmark at extreme systems.
Update: 8/24/12
We ended up going back to the dell H710P after having a few issues with the uEFI bios not playing well with the controller at post. Not to mention LSI webbios is a horrible pile of useless shit, this is 2012 why the hell do we have this prehistoric pile of crap UI on a raid controller. Whoever at LSI approved that to be shipped on the cards should be forced to stand in a fire.
The H710P has dells lovely customized controller bios which is keyboard driven EASY to use and FAST to configure with. Performance of the H710P is actually a little bit better than the 9266-8i while the hardware is identical.
Another major issue with the 9266 is when you would remove a drive *failure simulation* and replace it, the controller would mark the new drive as bad vs treating it as a fresh drive to rebuild on. Without the CLI or MegaRaid Storage Manager this is a rather annoying problem to deal with as you would need to reboot the system to fix it in WEbiboss11!!111.. POS.
The H710P obviously works with dells unified system and can be accessed a number of ways without the operating system even knowing about it.
The configuration:
- 16x Samsung 830 256GB MLC SSD
- Raid 6 with read and write caching (BBU backed). 64KB Block Size
- Dell R720 16 Bay 8i SAS6 Expanded Backplane 2 Ports 16 devices.
The Benchmarks!
Here are some prelim benchmarks of the actual performance inside a VMware machine.
LSI 9266-8i
Children see throughput for 32 initial writers = 214905.26 ops/sec
Parent sees throughput for 32 initial writers = 198172.68 ops/sec
Min throughput per process = 6392.06 ops/sec
Max throughput per process = 7173.76 ops/sec
Avg throughput per process = 6715.79 ops/sec
Min xfer = 925970.00 opsChildren see throughput for 32 readers = 734057.97 ops/sec
Parent sees throughput for 32 readers = 734011.56 ops/sec
Min throughput per process = 22833.85 ops/sec
Max throughput per process = 23062.16 ops/sec
Avg throughput per process = 22939.31 ops/sec
Min xfer = 1038205.00 opsChildren see throughput for 32 random readers = 55662.96 ops/sec
Parent sees throughput for 32 random readers = 55662.71 ops/sec
Min throughput per process = 1730.88 ops/sec
Max throughput per process = 1751.76 ops/sec
Avg throughput per process = 1739.47 ops/sec
Min xfer = 1036073.00 opsChildren see throughput for 32 random writers = 19827.16 ops/sec
Parent sees throughput for 32 random writers = 19090.45 ops/sec
Min throughput per process = 584.53 ops/sec
Max throughput per process = 663.61 ops/sec
Avg throughput per process = 619.60 ops/sec
Min xfer = 967988.00 ops
Dell H710P
Children see throughput for 32 initial writers = 489124.60 ops/sec
Parent sees throughput for 32 initial writers = 435746.51 ops/sec
Min throughput per process = 14005.25 ops/sec
Max throughput per process = 17028.75 ops/sec
Avg throughput per process = 15285.14 ops/sec
Min xfer = 860278.00 opsChildren see throughput for 32 readers = 678563.56 ops/sec
Parent sees throughput for 32 readers = 678524.72 ops/sec
Min throughput per process = 21111.18 ops/sec
Max throughput per process = 21253.53 ops/sec
Avg throughput per process = 21205.11 ops/sec
Min xfer = 1041599.00 opsChildren see throughput for 32 random readers = 59482.27 ops/sec
Parent sees throughput for 32 random readers = 59482.00 ops/sec
Min throughput per process = 1851.91 ops/sec
Max throughput per process = 1869.25 ops/sec
Avg throughput per process = 1858.82 ops/sec
Min xfer = 1038852.00 opsChildren see throughput for 32 random writers = 20437.99 ops/sec
Parent sees throughput for 32 random writers = 19228.06 ops/sec
Min throughput per process = 610.33 ops/sec
Max throughput per process = 695.63 ops/sec
Avg throughput per process = 638.69 ops/sec
Min xfer = 945641.00 ops
We are thinking about the same configuration for using SSD´s with VSphere 5. This endurance test for the Samsung 830 looks very promising and the LSI 92xx Controller are working fine with VMware. Did you have any problems with the LSI Controller together with the 830 ? Is there the garbage collection working well with 830, because we cannot trim these SSd´s with an RAID controller ? Is the a way to read out the SMART values with the LSI controller ?
@Alex
The samsung SSD have their own internal wear leveling and garabage collection process that is NOT reliant on the operating system or controller.
We had no issues getting the 9266 or h710p to show the array under vmware.
You can view individual drive information by using MegaCLI. There is a VMware compiled version of the application available.