LSI 9361 8i RAID Controller Poor Read Performance

[lebishop]

In my brand new Lenovo P710 I have (5) 4TB WD Black drives striped to RAID 5 using the LSI 8361 8i RAID Controller. The read speeds are abysmal. Using the ATTO benchmark tool I'm getting very low marks. With the AJA speed test, only 23MB/sec.

I am completely new to RAID configurations and I've been teaching myself as I go. I wonder if perhaps I've set something up incorrectly. Either way, I need to improve these speeds.

A couple of questions come to mind:

- There are 2 SAS jumper cables connected to the LSI card, each one can accommodate (4) drives. Does it matter which plug on the card the jumper plugged into the first 4 drives is plugged into? In other words, do drives 1-4 need to be plugged into plug #1 (they aren't numbered on the card) and drive 5 plugged into plug #2?

- LSI documentation talks about this program called StorCLI, a command line app that is supposed to be able to run from any directory on your computer (Windows 10). I can run it, but it doesn't read any of the commands. Any ideas? Does it even matter?

Does anyone have experience setting up these cards? I could use a little hand holding.

Many thanks in advance for taking the time to read.

Pics of my config attached.

 

[lebishop]

Per the advice of Broadcom (Avago/LSI) tech support, I needed to enable the cache and change my write policy. This can be done with the StoreCLI app downloadable at their website.

The commands are:

./storcli /cx/vx set rdcache=RA
./storcli /cx/vx set pdcache=On
storcli /cx/vx set wrcache=AWB

For max performance, you need to set disk cache = enabled
Controller cache = Always write back

My disk cache was disabled and controller cache set to write through.

After doing this I saw a huge improvement in my write performance.