Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Dell PERC H310 Controller RAID 5 Performance Issues

The Dell Perc H310 Raid Controller is a budget raid controller sold by Dell. This controller performs adequately in budget servers when in RAID 1 but when it is configured in RAID 5 performance drops to nearly unusable.

Here is a screenshot of the proof:


In identical hardware the h310 controller when convereted from raid 1 to raid 5 there is an 83% decrease in performance. at 12 megabytes per second our now gigabit backbone is essentially 100 mbit when writing to the raid array.

The 3 year old HP server with a 256mb P-series controller has 1500% better performance than the h310 controller. While this may not fair to compare the 2, since the HP server has a 256MB ram, you would hope that the Dell card would be able to write at a rate that is faster than USB2.

Dell's solution to this problem, that they are aware of, is to replace the h310 with an h710. But try telling that to a client who only just purchased a server less than a year ago.

1 comment:

  1. I had the same poor results and the same lame answers from Dell. This is not just bad performance, it's just unacceptable.

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