Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces Simple RAID 0 VERY SLOW reads, but fast writes with LSI 9207-8e SAS JBOD HBA Controller

Has anyone else seen Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces with a Simple RAID 0 (also happens with Mirrored RAID 1 and Parity RAID 5) virtual disk exhibiting extremely slow read speed of 5Mb/sec, yet write performance is normal at 650Mb/sec in RAID 0?

Windows Server 2012 Standard

Intel i7 CPU and Motherboard

LSI 9207-8e 6Gb SAS JBOD Controller with latest firmware/BIOS and Windows driver.

(4) Hitachi 4TB 6Gb SATA Enterprise Hard Disk Drives HUS724040ALE640

(4) Hitachi 4TB 6Gb SATA Desktop Hard Disk Drives HDS724040ALE640

Hitachi drives are directly connected to LSI 9207-8e using a 2-meter SAS SFF-8088 to eSATA cable to six-inch eSATA/SATA adapter.

The Enterprise drives are on LSI's compatibility list.  The Desktop drives are not, but regardless, both drive models are affected by the problem.

Interestingly, this entire configuration but with two SIIG eSATA 2-Port adapters instead of the LSI 9207-8e, works perfectly with both reads and writes at 670Mb/sec.

I thought SAS was going to be a sure bet for expanding beyond the capacity of port limited eSATA adapters, but after a week of frustration and spending over $5,000.00 on drives, controllers and cabling, it's time to ask for help!

Any similar experiences or solutions?



  • Edited by SEO Friday, April 12, 2013 6:40 AM
April 12th, 2013 9:38am

Has anyone else seen Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces with a Simple RAID 0 (also happens with Mirrored RAID 1 and Parity RAID 5) virtual disk exhibiting extremely slow read speed of 5Mb/sec, yet write performance is normal at 650Mb/sec in RAID 0?

Windows Server 2012 Standard

Intel i7 CPU and Motherboard

LSI 9207-8e 6Gb SAS JBOD Controller with latest firmware/BIOS and Windows driver.

(4) Hitachi 4TB 6Gb SATA Enterprise Hard Disk Drives HUS724040ALE640

(4) Hitachi 4TB 6Gb SATA Desktop Hard Disk Drives HDS724040ALE640

Hitachi drives are directly connected to LSI 9207-8e using a 2-meter SAS SFF-8088 to eSATA cable to six-inch eSATA/SATA adapter.

The Enterprise drives are on LSI's compatibility list.  The Desktop drives are not, but regardless, both drive models are affected by the problem.

Interestingly, this entire configuration but with two SIIG eSATA 2-Port adapters instead of the LSI 9207-8e, works perfectly with both reads and writes at 670Mb/sec.

I thought SAS was going to be a sure bet for expanding beyond the capacity of port limited eSATA adapters, but after a week of frustration and spending over $5,000.00 on drives, controllers and cabling, it's time to ask for help!

Any similar experiences or solutions?



1) Yes, being slow either on reads or on writes is a quite common situation for storage spaces. See references (with some of the solutions I hope):

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverfiles/thread/a58f8fce-de45-4032-a3ef-f825ee39b96e/

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askpfeplat/archive/2012/10/10/windows-server-2012-storage-spaces-is-it-for-you-could-be.aspx

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserver8gen/thread/64aff15f-2e34-40c6-a873-2e0da5a355d2/

and this one is my favorite putting a lot of light on the issue:

http://helgeklein.com/blog/2012/03/windows-8-storage-spaces-bugs-and-design-flaws/

2) Issues with SATA-to-SAS hardware is also very common. See:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverClustering/thread/5d4f68b7-5fc4-4a3c-8232-a2a68bf3e6d2

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April 12th, 2013 1:29pm

Wow, after a solid week of utter frustration along with sleep deprivation, I have managed to fix this problem!!!! :-)

Turns out the culprit was the one thing that shouldn't be the problem - the SAS cable!

Lesson Learned: BE CAREFUL OF CHEAP, INEXPENSIVE SAS CABLES!

Yup, the SFF-8088 SAS to SATA cable was messing up the works.

After I (finally) noticed multiple Windows Event Viewer error messages about Disk I/O problems "The IO operation at logical block address 5e5ef0 for Disk 4 was retried", I removed all the drives from the RAID 0 array and tested each disk drive individually by copying a 40GB file to/from a separate drive directly connected to a 6Gb motherboard SATA port.

Incredibly, three of the six drives failed the test.  A 50% failure rate on brand new drives is improbable.  And, since the LSI 9207-8e board has a great reputation, the only remaining scofflaw, tragically, was the !@*^$#g SAS cable.

Fortunately, a vendor of LSI certified cables (www.MagentaComputer.com) was able to quickly provide the perfect, very high-quality working SAS cable.  For the record, Magenta Computer is unrelated to the source of the bad SAS cable.

Thankfully, all is working perfectly now!  No more slow performance!!! :-)   Storage Spaces works great!!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2012 hiyohiyo
                           Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

           Sequential Read :  1198.373 MB/s
          Sequential Write :  1221.939 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :    75.286 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :   351.124 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :     1.156 MB/s [   282.3 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :    12.881 MB/s [  3144.8 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :    10.397 MB/s [  2538.3 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :    12.844 MB/s [  3135.7 IOPS]

  Test : 1000 MB [D: 0.3% (83.3/29799.9 GB)] (x5)
  Date : 2013/04/12 18:05:42
    OS : Windows Server 2012 Server Standard Edition (full installation) [6.2 Build 9200] (x64)
    Hitachi 4TB SATA 7200 RPM (4) Desktop and (4) Enterprise HDD's on LSI 9207-8e SAS Controller thru (2) SAS SFF-8088 to 4-Connectors SATA cables in WS2012 Storage Spaces RAID0.

Hope this detail helps others...




April 13th, 2013 6:49am

Wish it would be THAT easy to solve for everybody!
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April 13th, 2013 12:23pm

Here are speed performance benchmarks of Windows Server 2012 Storage Spaces Mirrored RAID 1 and Parity RAID 5 using eight (8) Hitachi 4TB SATA drives.  Yes, the slow Parity write numbers are accurate.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2012 hiyohiyo
                           Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

           Sequential Read :   665.868 MB/s
          Sequential Write :   663.236 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :    68.356 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :   136.756 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :     0.895 MB/s [   218.6 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :     4.924 MB/s [  1202.1 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :     9.335 MB/s [  2279.0 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :     5.137 MB/s [  1254.0 IOPS]

  Test : 1000 MB [D: 0.6% (83.3/14895.9 GB)] (x5)
  Date : 2013/04/12 21:28:04
    OS : Windows Server 2012 Server Standard Edition (full installation) [6.2 Build 9200] (x64)
    Hitachi 4TB SATA (4) Desktop and (4) Enterprise HDD's on LSI 9207-8e SAS Controller thru (2) SAS SFF-8088 to 4-Connectors SATA cables in WS2012 Storage Spaces Mirrored RAID 1


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2012 hiyohiyo
                           Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

           Sequential Read :  1075.620 MB/s
          Sequential Write :    75.394 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :    72.411 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :    32.458 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :     1.086 MB/s [   265.2 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :     2.667 MB/s [   651.0 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :    10.270 MB/s [  2507.4 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :     2.753 MB/s [   672.1 IOPS]

  Test : 1000 MB [D: 0.2% (41.9/26067.9 GB)] (x5)
  Date : 2013/04/13 20:19:38
    OS : Windows Server 2012 Server Standard Edition (full installation) [6.2 Build 9200] (x64)
    Hitachi 4TB SATA (4) Desktop and (4) Enterprise HDD's on LSI 9207-8e SAS Controller thru (2) SAS SFF-8088 to 4-Connectors SATA cables in WS2012 Storage Spaces Parity RAID 5

April 15th, 2013 1:17am

Just wanted to add to this post, in this case the OP's issue was bad SAS cables, I ran into the same issue as the OP but the problem was with the latest LSI Firmware (P20) was causing extremely poor read performance (Sub 30MB/s reads) on all 3 of my LSI 9211-8i SAS cards. I was also seeing a large number of 153 Event Id's in the Event log of my Windows 2012 R2 Server with messages like "The IO operation at logical block address 0xb53f8 for Disk 4 (PDO name: \Device\00000046) was retried.)"

I rolled back the firmware to P17 and all the issues went away.

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November 14th, 2014 4:03am

Just wanted to add to this post, in this case the OP's issue was bad SAS cables, I ran into the same issue as the OP but the problem was with the latest LSI Firmware (P20) was causing extremely poor read performance (Sub 30MB/s reads) on all 3 of my LSI 9211-8i SAS cards. I was also seeing a large number of 153 Event Id's in the Event log of my Windows 2012 R2 Server with messages like "The IO operation at logical block address 0xb53f8 for Disk 4 (PDO name: \Device\00000046) was retried.)"

I rolled back the firmware to P17 and all the issues went away.

I experienced something similar: Had a test system (HP ML110 G7, Windows Server 2012 R2) with two LSI9211-8i and P19 IR firmware running fine. While preparing for production upgraded to P20 IR and saw poor performance and 153 Event IDs.

Since I had to erase the flash to downgrade (using a DOS boot USB made with rufus), I decided to cross-flash to the P19 IT firmware, which is supposed to perform slightly better in a JBOD setting. Works nicely again.

BTW, I tried the P20 IT firmware too - it has the same issues as the P20 IR firmware.

  • Proposed as answer by Arkodiy 34 minutes ago
November 17th, 2014 4:09pm

Thank You! It saved me a lot of time.
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February 16th, 2015 6:46am

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