I've got two HP DL380 G7 servers + P812 controller + D2700 enclosure. They're database servers with 144 Gb RAM. P812 firmware is 6.40, D2700 is at 0147
They both worked great with 18 OWC Mercury Extreme SSDs (SATA). After I added 6 more SSDs in both D2700 enclosures to make 24 SSDs in each enclosure, one of the servers is exhibiting very poor disk performance compared to how it was before the upgrade and compared to the other server.
So I suspect that one of the 6 SSDs that was added to the server with poor performance is faulty. But which one? HP Arrays Configuration Utility doesn't show any issues and no issues appear at POST. Even the long ACU report doesn't show anything.
So I'd like to see the S.M.A.R.T. attributes for these drives to see if I can pick out the one failing. Is there a Windows tool that will allow me to view S.M.A.R.T. attributes in this configuration?
In a very similar question 3rd party SSD drives in HP Proliant server – monitoring drive health it is suggested to use smartctl from smartmontools. Unfortunately, I'm not having any luck seeing the SSDs behind the P812+D2700 – how can I make smartctl work?
C:\Program Files\smartmontools\bin>smartctl -a /dev/sdc,0 -T permissive -s on
smartctl 6.3 2014-06-23 r3922 [x86_64-w64-mingw32-2012r2] (cf-20140623)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor: HP
Product: LOGICAL VOLUME
Revision: 6.40
User Capacity: 5,760,841,244,672 bytes [5.76 TB]
Logical block size: 512 bytes
Rotation Rate: 15000 rpm
Logical Unit id: 0x600508b1001cf0ebb14e9131d7XXXXXX
Serial number: PAGXQ0ARXXXXXX
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Fri Dec 12 18:42:32 2014 EST
SMART support is: Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.
=== START OF ENABLE/DISABLE COMMANDS SECTION ===
unable to fetch IEC (SMART) mode page [Input/output error]
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
Error Counter logging not supported
Device does not support Self Test logging
Here is the output for the command suggested by the very similar question (I changed /dev/sda to /dev/sdc because that's the device of the first volume on the P812:
C:\Program Files\smartmontools\bin>smartctl -a -l ssd /dev/sdc -d sat+cciss,1
smartctl 6.3 2014-06-23 r3922 [x86_64-w64-mingw32-2012r2] (cf-20140623)
Copyright (C) 2002-14, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
/dev/sdc: Type 'sat+...': Unknown device type 'cciss,1'
=======> VALID ARGUMENTS ARE: ata, scsi, sat[,auto][,N][+TYPE], usbcypress[,X], usbjmicron[,p][,x][,N], usbsunplus, areca,N[/E], auto, test <=======
Use smartctl -h to get a usage summary
Best Answer
Please provide numbers detailing your expected and actual performance figures.
Also, what is the SAS topology? How many SFF-8088 cables are in place between the host and the D2700 JBOD?
As I mentioned earlier, the HP StorageWorks D2700 is S.M.A.R.T. aware and reports on SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) details... But your use case here is narrow. That's a lot of SATA drives on an expander. We know that SATA timeouts can cause issues with performance on a shared expander backplane, like the one in the D2700. However, that's more likely to be a spinning media issue; not a problem with an SSD.
In my experience, SSDs either work or they don't. There isn't much in-between (unless you've hit a write endurance limit). So the things I'd look at are:
You expanded the array because you were out of space. Exactly how out of space were you prior to expansion? I'd hope that you hadn't exhausted space. Think about SSDs and the lack of TRIM support on that controller.
I would have recommended under-provisioning these drives or limiting the Logical Drive size to account for the missing TRIM functionality.
Update your firmware. You're on an unsupported release of the D2700 enclosure firmware (it was recalled), and your RAID controller is also behind. As of this writing, 0149 is the right D2700 firmware, and your controller should be on version 6.60. Upgrade the hosts as well.
It may be time to step up your game. 24 x consumer SATA SSDs on oversubscribed buses (RAID controller and JBOD backplane), where the 6Gbps SATA drives are downshifted to 3Gbps, means that you've also reached the upper-bounds of the hardware. The Smart Array P812 controller has diminishing returns on SSD IOPS at ~6 disks.