LSI Megaraid 9260/9261 driver issue on Solaris x86-64
823554May 3 2011 — edited May 3 2011We have several x4170 M2 machines with either the LSI 9260 or 9261 megaraid cards (same driver) where SUN uses the "SUNWmr_sas" driver, and you can download the latest driver from LSI website as "mr_sas". Using SUN Solaris 10 update 9 with latestl patches, x86 64-bit version .
Created two RAID arrays in the card BIOS (RAID1 using 2 disks and a RAID5 using 6 disks). Each disk is a 146GB 10k RPM SAS drive. The firmware on the card is the latest version from April 2011.
A copy from the RAID1 array to the RAID5 array yields a measly 5MB/s transfer speed. Tried both drivers with the same result. Tried all sorts of RAID array settings with no luck.
Installed Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS 64-bit version without touching the RAID array settings and the transfer speed jumped to over 100 MB/s (expected results).
Network copies to a single array and local copies within a single array perform as expected. Only the copy from one array to the other seems to be effected.
This leads me to believe the LSI driver for Solaris is at fault. Any thoughts? Anyone else noticing this poor performance?