3Ware 9690SA-8i with BBU - Revisted (PICS)

thideras said:

Sometimes the easiest answer is the best one

Click to expand...

It just sucks... all that moola and no mobo to get it to run at full speed...

However, I may revisit it again, once I get this board... It has plenty of SATA ports for me to fall back on, if the RAID card does not work on this board...

Joeteck said:

However, I may revisit it again, once I get this board... It has plenty of SATA ports for me to fall back on, if the RAID card does not work on this board...

Click to expand...

Then get an Areca!

Same price range, and you know it works...

Retail - $450
Open box - $307

thideras said:

Then get an Areca!

Same price range, and you know it works...

Retail - $450
Open box - $307

Click to expand...

How many drives?

Wow! Really great research, joeteck! I'm going to enter my BIOS setup tomorrow and see if there are any configuration parameters that might change this "video" PCIe slot to a "regular" PCIe slot.

Intel ICHxR RAID seems to provide very good performance for two-drive RAID 0 or 1 setups---about 500 to 600 MB/s from what I have read. You situation requires RAID 5 which ICH RAID doesn't accel at. A HW RAID card seems to be a requirement for your application.

I would REALLY love if you continued to post your findings and eventual solution. I will post my HD Tune results tomorrow for comparison.

Did you read where I am also having problems with applications intermittently and temporarily freezing for 10-20 seconds at a time? I am starting to suspect this is a time-out issue with my Velociraptors, but I didn't experience this problem with a previous ICH10R RAID 1 configuration that also used the same Velociraptors. Seems the 3Ware 9690 may not like the Velociraptors, assuming my suspicions are true.

Please keep posting on this topic!

i have tried the card in new boards and old, is not the boards or chipsets, it is this card.

i have it now in a Asus K8N-DL board, tested it in a Dell SC440 and T105, as well as my Asus P5Q-E board at home, same performance on all.

Not to sound like I bashing anyone or anything but I'd always been leery of 3Ware cards from what I'd seen in reviews to begin with, the Areca 1210 I have in here was the first dedicated raid card I tried after researching awhile and have been very happy with it, just wish Id bought a 1220 at the time.

As far as MOBO's go I'm sure most know some slots will default, I went from an ASUS P45 chipset to a X-48 Rampage just to get the Areca to work with the 1210 in the second vid slot with a HD4870x2. Anything below a X48 probably isnt going to play well with a high end video card and a hardware raid controller, someone correct me if Im wrong here or going off base. Well I'll correct myself a bit in a second I guess, if your using older video cards and have multiple PCI-Ex8 slots it'll work too.

Why I bought a X48 chipset minimum just to get my raid card working again with this set up on the ASUS board, it used to work fine with my old EVGA 780i and two GTS8800OC's because it had 3 PCI-Ex8 slots on it.

Once I switched to a Maximus Formula II with the P45 chipset and a HD4870X2 it ran well but not if I tried to use the Areca card. The slots would both default to PCI-Ex8 and the vid card wouldn't work. So I just didn't use the raid card for awhile. Then I got a bit miffed at myself for not using it.

So I opted for the Rampage formula with the dual PCI-Ex16 and the HD4870x2 and the Areca play fine together.

I know there are plenty of DFI's and various other things that work well with multi slot set-ups, and the I7's with the X58's I'd imagine these days, but just thought I'd through a thing or two out there on how I've gotten my stuff to co-exist I guess at the moment if it of any use to anyone.



Damn you man, now Thideras got me looking at that 1220 hehe. Nah my wife would string me up Bought the RE3's lately and told her I was swearing off stuff awhile. 1220's run 8 HD's BTW.

I'd still like a 1231 with the 2G ram on it but oh well

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151033

Or the bigger boys, maybe I'l hit the Lotto soon

Well, I poked around in my BIOS (Intel DX58SO running Core i7 965) and found PCIe settings:

Negotiated Link: 8x
Speed: 2.5 GT/s
PCI Express 1.1 Compatibility: Disabled

Hence, I enabled PCIe 1.1 Compatibility... no effect.



Seems to me this card is correctly communicating on the bus at 8x. It just doesn't have decent throughput. Other than SAS support, Intel Matrix RAID is far better!

Upgraded firmware to the latest pre-release: FH9X 4.06.00.013
Windows x64 driver: 3.00.04.056

No improvement:

It sounds like the pci-e speeds are getting set to 1x,cpu-z tells you the pci-e speed of the slot.Probaly a chipset setting.

DEZMOND said:

It sounds like the pci-e speeds are getting set to 1x,cpu-z tells you the pci-e speed of the slot.Probaly a chipset setting.

Click to expand...

Nope. You missed reading this:

"Well, I poked around in my BIOS (Intel DX58SO running Core i7 965) and found PCIe settings:

Negotiated Link: 8x
Speed: 2.5 GT/s
PCI Express 1.1 Compatibility: Disabled"

This is really a shame. Anyone looking at this card after doing a google search will find this thread and not get it any longer. Slorider, You have the 4i version. I have the 8i. You're lucky! You only lost $300 apposed to my $600...lol

Seriously! I'm not sure what else to try. I pretty much think it is what it is.

Yes, I was conservative and got the 4i. Man, I'm glad! Sorry about your loss and waste of time. This is not the first time I should have done more research first!

I'm going back to on-board ICH10R RAID. It's throughput is at least 3x the 3Ware card--certainly more than enough for a couple 2-drive RAID0/1 arrays. Not true for your application. The main reason I bought HW RAID was for the added BBU and higher reliability.

Also, there's a lot of difficulty getting *nix drivers for Intel Matrix RAID, but I only wanted to "play" with Linux. Guess I won't be doing that. *nix people: Windows DOES have some advantages.

SLORider said:

Seriously! I'm not sure what else to try. I pretty much think it is what it is.

Yes, I was conservative and got the 4i. Man, I'm glad! Sorry about your loss and waste of time. This is not the first time I should have done more research first!

I'm going back to on-board ICH10R RAID. It's throughput is at least 3x the 3Ware card--certainly more than enough for a couple 2-drive RAID0/1 arrays. Not true for your application. The main reason I bought HW RAID was for the added BBU and higher reliability.

Also, there's a lot of difficulty getting *nix drivers for Intel Matrix RAID, but I only wanted to "play" with Linux. Guess I won't be doing that. *nix people: Windows DOES have some advantages.

Click to expand...

Believe it or not, I'm not giving up just yet. When ever I take the plunge on this new gigabyte board, I'll have 3 PCI-e slots to try... and if it works, you'll know about it. I want to upgrade to this anyway, since it has enough sata ports for my six 250gig drives in raid 0, and two 250gig drives in RAID 0 on the other sata controller for the boot. I like sata back plane. I already have a 4 drive (My avatar), and then I'll add this 3 drive, to make it look like a xmas tree. But if the crapware works, I can always use the onboard for additional 6 internal hard drives for a total of 14. Which would be knowingly ridiculous, but so much fun.

i still need to flash my Seagate ES drives, if that doesn't work i will see what 3ware says next.

have you open a support ticket with 3ware?, i would do that, cause if you dont get the performace from it, maybe they will get you a better card.

Mr.Guvernment said:

i still need to flash my Seagate ES drives, if that doesn't work i will see what 3ware says next.

have you open a support ticket with 3ware?, i would do that, cause if you dont get the performace from it, maybe they will get you a better card.

Click to expand...

lol! a better card? the 9690SA-8i is their top of the line card... no going up! If anything, down...

But I see your point!

However, that BBU plays a major role. I have a 9690SA-8i in my server, and it NOW get mad performance, so it does make a difference. When I check off the cache in the gui it no longer give me an error..

The first picture is my boot RAID 1 array. Look at the latency!! and average read! The second image is the RAID 5 array. four 15K seagates. Since its in production, HD tach shows it, but HD_speed does not allow for the slow down... Its my SQL 2005 server.

Joeteck said:

lol! a better card? the 9690SA-8i is their top of the line card... no going up! If anything, down...

Click to expand...

Did you notice that 3Ware got bought by LSI? I'll take an LSI card!

Joeteck said:

However, that BBU plays a major role. I have a 9690SA-8i in my server, and it NOW get mad performance, so it does make a difference. When I check off the cache in the gui it no longer give me an error..

The first picture is my boot RAID 1 array. Look at the latency!! and average read! The second image is the RAID 5 array. four 15K seagates. Since its in production, HD tach shows it, but HD_speed does not allow for the slow down... Its my SQL 2005 server.

Click to expand...

I'm confused. The BBU did make a difference? Looks like similar performance maxed out around 150 MB/s.

Intel's ICH Matrix RAID can do 300-500 MB/s.

SLORider said:

My 9690SA is plugged into the 2nd PCI-e slot of an Intel DX58SO motherboard. I am seeing similar performance. Any way of PROVING what multiplier the card slot is actually running would be very nice. I hate guessing.

THANKS to you, Joeteck, for investigating the BBU claim with your $$$.

As you read in my other thread, I am reverting to ICH10R RAID 0 & 1. It has been shown to provide 500-600 MB/s throughput for 2-drive arrays. Unless someone can prove the PCI-e slot multiplier is the bottleneck, it appears the 3ware 9690 just cannot provide throughput.

Aren't the 15K SAS drives great, though! Savvios? I'm using them in my Intel server and I can tell you the Intel SRCSAS18E RAID works great with both SAS and SATA drives. I didn't cut any corners building my server which is almost 100% Intel (read: big bucks). Whatever your thoughts on THAT happen to be, I never have to listen to the RAID card mfg. pointing fingers at the MB mfg.!

I'm keeping my eye's on your posts and will experiment with my 9690 a bit more.

Click to expand...

got some numbers for your SRCSAS18E, i am building a new 8 core server for work and am considering that card, i have 6 x Segate 500G ES2 drives (which can do about 95mb average per drive) and want to do a raid 50 likely but want something that has good performance for a MySQL database.

this was the link they had sent me for my Segate drives

http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=15385

not sure if maybe you can find one for yours

The 3Ware 9690 definitely SUCKS. I ran dozens of benchmark tests with various drive combinations and never saw anything above 150 MB/s on the 3Ware:

Intel X25-E 64 GB SSD (Single drive)
3Ware 9690SA-4I vs. Intel on-board ICH10R
Here, a single Intel X25-E is connected as a single drive, first through the 3Ware 9690SA RAID card, then via Intel on-board ICH10R (AHCI mode).

The 3Ware graph shows lots of instability compared to the on-board ICH10R. I have noticed this fluctuation is caused by other RAID card activity which interferes with data transfers. Essentially, the 3Ware card is maxed-out at 127 MB/s. Compare with the ICH10R graph which is beautifully clean and nearly DOUBLE the throughput at 229 MB/s!

Also, notice the ICH10R maximum throughput is only a couple points higher than the average throughput. This indicates the Intel SSD is not struggling to maintain its maximum throughput, and the ICR10R is not struggling to cleanly pass that bandwidth on to the system.

The 3Ware graph access time measurement of 0.2 ms is wonderful, but compared with the ICH10R's unmeasurable 0.0ms it is evident that the 3Ware 9690SA is a bottleneck. Burst rate is better on the ICH10R connection.



RAID 1 - 1 TB Western Digital HDD
3Ware 9690SA-4I vs. Intel on-board ICH10R
Connected to the 3Ware 9690 are a pair of WD1001FALS (Caviar Black). Connected to the ICH10R are a pair of WD1002FBYS (RE3). Both are configured as RAID 1 mirrors.

Because the drives are not identical, I won't nitpick the slight difference in transfer rates shown in the graphs. It is evident that the 3Ware 9690 RAID 1 is capable of handling the bandwidth of a pair of these drives. However, the 3Ware graph again shows lots of fluctuation compared to ICH10R RAID. The access time plot (yellow dots) are much more cleanly grouped in the ICH10R test as well. Burst rate is much better on the Intel RAID.



RAID 1 - WD3000FALS 300 GB Velociraptors
I don't have a comparison for this graph as my Velociraptors are currently serving as my OS drive. However, we know that a pair of Velociraptors in RAID 1 are capable of better bandwidth.

A mechanical HDD graph should slant down on the right because transfer rate falls off as the heads reach the inner tracks of the platter. The 3Ware RAID card is the bottleneck in this case and the transfer rate graph stays flat as the card's maximum. The graph is very dirty as the OS is competing for resources during the test, but once again, the 3Ware card is simply just unable to make a clean plot. Access time is good.

Mr.Guvernment said:

this was the link they had sent me for my Segate drives

http://www.3ware.com/KB/article.aspx?id=15385

not sure if maybe you can find one for yours

Click to expand...

I'm not using 500 or 1TB drives.. I'm using 250gig drive ST3250410AS 16MB cache drives

Slorider... Turn on the writeback cache and watch it scream!