Poor performance from a RocketRaid620.

I have recently added a new WD EARX 2TB drive to my system.

Last night, having just installed rc9a, I tried starting a parity check.  I was dismayed to find that it was only achieving 30MB/sec rather than the 100+MB/sec I am accustomed to.

I had just posted in the rc9 release thread to notify the drop in performance when I remembered the new drive.  I quickly deleted my post!

I realised that I'd put the new drive into one of the bays which is connected to my RocketRaid 620 controller.  All other data drives are connected to my SuperMicro AOC USAS2 controller.

I ran the Disk Speed Test user script in unMENU and discovered that the new drive was only achieving 12.5MB/sec buffered reads.  I moved the new drive on to the USAS2 controller.  Parity check is back to 100+MB/s and Disk Speed Test reports 110.5MB/sec buffered reads.

Some quick googling revealed that there are complaints about poor performance on the Rocket cards, but this is in respect to SSD devices achieving only 400MB/s - nothing that would restrict the performance of a rotating disk, and certainly nothing as slow as I'm seeing.

Both my RR and USAS2 cards are in PCIe 2.0 slots.

So, why is my card performing so badly?  Is it because I'm using the generic AHCI driver, with assistance from elkay14's enable_ahci.sh script, or might there be some other reason?  I thought about building the HighPoint rr62x driver, but found, not surprisingly, that the standard unRAID memory drive does not contain all the kernel include files.

Is there anyway that I can build and install the rr62x driver, or is it possible to install a pre-built binary (.ko?) of the rr62x?  Would I be wasting my time doing this - should I be looking elsewhere, even replacing the RR620?

Now, here's an odd thing!

Having changed my system from an Intel DH55TC mobo/i3 530 combo, to an X9SCM-iiF/Xeon E3-1230 combo, I thought that I would use the unMENU disk speed test again.

This time I played around with a gash WD EADS 1TB.  I now get a reported 95MB/s buffered read on both a SATA3 mobo port and on the RocketRaid 620.

Has the hardware change made this difference (if so, why)?

Or has the change from rc9a to rc11 made the difference (if so, why)?

Perhaps I should go back to rc9a and test that on the new hardware?

Incidentally, an interesting comparison of different drive performances:

The EADS (the oldest drive tested) has the same performance as a much more recent Hitachi drive, being the slowest at less than 100MB/s.  The EARS drives come next at around 100MB/s.  The EARX is next, at 115MB/s.  My three Samsung drives, of different models and vintages (a 502, a 204 and a 103), are by far the fastest, reporting 133 - 142 MB/s.  One EARS and one Samsung are on SATA2 mobo ports, the rest of the drives are on the USAS2-L8i.

I've seen the same general performance levels between WD EADS, EARS and EARX and Samsung drives.  Is your card a RocketRaid 620 or Rocket 620A?

It's definitely the RocketRAID.

I've got the Rocket 620A and it works without the script.  If your current setup is working OK now I wouldn't worry about it anymore unless you need to switch back to the older hardware.  Could just be some incompatibility between the older components/unraid version/BIOS/card settings/etc.  There have been plenty of posts from people with controller cards that wouldn't run properly in certain motherboards or pcie slots.