R680 optimisation

Hi.
I am needing to get the most throughput from an R680 and I-storage Pro 16 bay combo wondering how to.

My setup is:
2010 Mac pro
OSX 10.6.8
R680 in a 16xPcie2 slot - latest Flash FW, Driver v3.02, using Atto config tool 3.38
i-Storage pro 16 bay with 16x2TB Hitachi Deskstar HDD.

With the raid set to 0 the Black Magic disk speed test gets - write ~450MBs Read ~430MBs.

Would greatly appreciate any help in getting this upwards of 1000MBs read and write.

Thanks, Nir.

[Jon Schilling] "Unfortunately there's nothing more you can do to get more speed except to trade in that ATTO R680 card & get an Areca 1882X card."

Jon, looks like there are multiple benchmarks clocking R680 at 1GB/s:
- ST8-U5 with 8 SSDs, 1503MB/s
- Dual G-Speed eS Pro (8 drives) - 1GB+/s
- Silverado with 8 drives - 1GB+/s

Possibly something's going on with Nir Shelter's system or drives?

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 - Los Angeles, CA

[Jon Schilling] "Maybe it is the iStorage enclosure, not sure. I would imagine the drives he's using are the Standard 2TB Deskstar drives, so that much should be OK. The speeds he indicated he's getting are way too low."

Agreed.

Four possible problem areas:
- drives
- iSPro enclosure
- R680 and its settings
- OS / host system issues

I'd start by breaking the existing RAID set, and clocking several drives individually via R680 to see if the bottleneck is there; then creating a RAID0 with 2-3 drives and seeing what the numbers are; if they are lower than they should be, take a few drives out of the enclosure, insert them into Mac Pro bays, clock them, see if the numbers are different vs. R680/iSPro.

That might give us enough info to see where the problem is.

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 - Los Angeles, CA

Figured it out was the mini SAS cable after all:
Apparently we were using a type CL2 cable thinner than the usual and when switched to a type CMG cable the thicker type we got through-puts of 1600 MBs raid 0 and 1200+ raid 6.

Nir Shelter
Data Wrangler/DIT/3D Engineer
http://www.datashelter.com.au