Smart Array P212 Raid controller on SBS 2008 ProLiant G6

Too many imponderables. For example, how are the disks set up? If the logs and data share the same disks the random I/O from the data areas will disrupt the log traffic, which is mostly sequential I/O and is disproportionately affected by a busy random access workload on the same disks.

Without some more insight into your configuration I can't really say what might be causing the problem.

For example, 60MB/sec off a RAID is about right for a 4-disk RAID-5 or RAID-10 with 64k stripes and 15k drives. Each drive will read one 64k stripe per revolution of the disk (about 250/sec for a 15k drive) which gives you 15MB/sec per drive.

The average seek time for a 15k disk is around 3ms across the whole disk. On a mostly contiguous 10GB file on a RAID volume with (say) 146GB or 300GB disks and a bit of help from the cache I could see 30MB/sec being a reasonable figure for a disk array configured as described above. It would indicate averaging a data read about every two revolutions of the disks.

That's a thought off the top of my head for a configuration one might reasonably expect to see on an ML350. However, I have no idea if that matches your actual configuration, so I can't really comment on whether the observations are relevant in your case.

Well, it's a little odd. I don't see many cases of mixing HP Smart Array controllers and Dell servers. Either way, the parity initialization doesn't begin until I/O is started on the new logical drive. May I ask how you're monitoring this? Via the HP Array Configuration Utility webpage? Perhaps the HP ACU command-line tool? If you have the latter installed, can you provide the output of:

ctrl all show config detail

We'd like to see that output to see if there's a potential issue with one of your disks.

From the HP Smart Array manual:

Background RAID creation 
When you create a RAID 1, RAID 5, or RAID 6 logical drive, the Smart Array controller must build the 
logical drive within the array and initialize the parity before enabling certain advanced performance 
techniques. Parity initialization takes several hours to complete. The time it takes depends on the size of the 
logical drive and the load on the controller. The Smart Array controller creates the logical drive, initializing 
the parity whenever the controller is not busy. While the controller creates the logical drive, you can access 
the storage volume which has full fault tolerance. 

Also, check the firmware on the Smart Array P411 controller. Do you have a cache module installed with a battery or flash backup? If not, you'll have other performance problems over time.