Intel 530 SSD 6 drive RAID performance severely reduced when Intel MegaRAID, RS25DB080 is upgraded to FW Package Build 23.29.0-0016 from 23.9.0-0018

[NWalk2]

Motherboard is S2600CO with 2 2860 XEON cores and 128GB of memory. Operating system is Ubuntu Linux 11.10. 6 Intel 530 drives are organized into a RAID0 attached to an Intel MegaRAID, RS25DB080, adapter. When I use the old FW Package build of 23.9.0-0018, I can get write speeds of nearly 2GB/s. When I upgrade the RS25DB080 to FW Package build 23.29.0-0016, the performance of the 6 drive RAID drops to under 300GB/sec.

I get nearly 2GB/s when I use Intel 520 drives, regardless of the FW package downloaded to the MegaRAID.

Is there some new configuration of the drives that is necessary to work better with the new MegaRAID firmware? Do the Intel 530's need to be secure erased and overprovisioned with the new firmware?

Attached is the log file from the MegaRAID. The end of the log indicates that I am getting unexpected sense events.

[David_A_Intel]

I checked the logs and noticed that there is a drive that is coming back with the Unexpected Sense errors:

Event Description: Unexpected sense: PD 09(e0xfc/s2) Path 4433221101000000, CDB: 00 00 00 00 00 00, Sense: 2/04/02

This indicates that the drive is not ready. I could not find any other entry that would explain why such performance impacts after the firmware upgrade. I noticed some entries saying "Event Description: Controller cache discarded due to memory/battery problems" with the previous firmware release.

How is it that you are measuring the performance of the drives?

[Salem_W_Intel1]

Do you have an update as to how you are measuring the RAID performance? The more details you can provide on this, the better for the diagnostics and investigation.