Terrible Performance with SATA Drives on Dell PowerEdge, steps to troubleshoot?

Posted by Tom on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Tom
Published on 2011-02-15T15:12:49Z Indexed on 2011/02/15 15:27 UTC
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Filed under:

raid

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dell-poweredge

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sata

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disk-performance

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bios

I had asked this question earlier and the question went missing so here it is again.

Bought a DELL Poweredge 2950 to use as in-house QA Server. Disk performance is beyond terrible, 1000-4000 ms response time on the drive with our SQL Server database .mdf. Sql Server disk queue upwards of 300 at times.

I'm a software guy, can anyone help me with steps to determine the issue?

I don't know what RAID controller it has, how can I determine that?

I'm speculating it could be BIOS issue. Perhaps the server used to have another kind of drive in it and when I added SATA the ??? buffer size is wrong???

Perhaps I chose wrong options (chose defaults) when setting up the RAID 1 arrays? I thought RAID 1 was a performance array?

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