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I just acquired a JBOD which was made in 2011, it has 60 2TB 7.2k SATA disks but using SATA-to-SAS adapters on each disk. There are two IO modules on the enclosure, each module offer 4 SFF-8088 ports, the speed of these SAS port is 3Gb/s. It was connected to a controller box equiped with 2 LSI SAS3160E(SAS1068E) HBA cards, running some kind of software raid. When connected the LSI HBA cards presents 120 disks to the controller(but actually only 60 disks, e.g. sdcc and sddj is the same disk). I have wiped out the software raid and managed to run CentOS 7 and zfs on it. If I run two sas cables from one HBA card to two IO modules, the write bandwidth is 1100MB/s. If I run two sas cables from two HBA cards to two IO modules, the write bandwidth is 1445MB/s.

I read that the LSI SAS1068E suffer from low performance issues. Is it possible to max out the bandwith by using a somewhat newer controller box(used servers are so cheap anyway)? I'm looking at the DELL R620 1U box, equiped with a LSI SAS9207-8e HBA card. The R620 has PCIe-3.0 slots, and SAS 9207-8e is 6Gb/s, will I get better bandwidth?

suggestions appreciated. Thanks.

R.Chu
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  • if the harddisk supports em, but i think a usually harddisk eill only have round about 100mb/s. in my feelings, 60hdds should have more speed as 1gb/s i think the hba is here the bottleneck at all – djdomi Oct 25 '19 at 05:50
  • 60 HDDs can aggregate 60*100MB/s=6000MB/s, that's much higher than the JBOD's backplane which is 3Gbps can provide, the two IO module should in therory do 3Gbps*4*2=24Gbps, I too think the old HBA card is the bottleneck – R.Chu Oct 25 '19 at 17:19
  • in my point of View, adding more cards might solve it – djdomi Oct 25 '19 at 18:09
  • but the controller is already equiped with two of those old HBA cards, each has dual controller chip, the Jbod has only two IO modules, two HBA cards is the max it can connect – R.Chu Oct 25 '19 at 21:21
  • then as told, get a better Controller that is Supporting all disk eith the io, if the mb isbt the bottleneck after all – djdomi Oct 27 '19 at 15:09
  • sofar, how many disks do you really have? did you uograded the Firmware of your server? – djdomi Oct 28 '19 at 11:51
  • 60 disks full enclosure. I will replace the controller box see what I get. – R.Chu Oct 29 '19 at 22:41
  • remind to upgrade the Firmware also – djdomi Oct 30 '19 at 21:36

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