Practical experiences from every day IT

Category: Hardware

  • How does an ATA Secure Erase speed up old SATA SSD’s?

    I recently came across an interesting quirk that I had tasked myself with investigating and figuring out. I had a couple older model Samsung SSD’s which, ran in conjunction with a PERC H730 controller. Unfortunately, as soon as the 1GB controller cache was full, they tumbled from their 500 MB/s design limitation (SATA-3, 6 Gbps) down to something like 30-40 MB/s, which is a horrible performance value for that hardware.

    Unaware of the actual reason for this, I started to poke around in the controller, switching between RAID and non-RAID (HBA-mode), retesting, and turning the controller cache on and off. But nothing really helped; they remained slow.

    As part of poking around I they tried a ATA Secure Erase procedure on one of the disks. The procedure requires 2-3 commands and is described excellently in the Thomas Krenn-Wiki.

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  • Kingston SUV500 with Dell PERC H730

    Both the PERC H730 and the Kingston SUV500 are really old hardware. Not only that, they also served two completely different markets: Enterprise versus Consumer. But that should not be a reason for the problem I describe next: There is some strange incompatibility running the Kingston SUV500 with a DELL PERC RAID-Controller (both in RAID- and HBA-mode).

    I recently had acquired some old server hardware to solve the recent, sometimes unpredictable, pricing changes for virtual and dedicated servers. Since the R330’s have plenty of free slots, I have had someone print me a couple of DELL 2,5 inch caddys and off we went to install the machines.

    After the initial installation on the SUV500 as a OS-disk, I started to encounter strange anomalies:

    • getting stuck at “Booting from Harddisk C:”
    • getting stuck at PERC controller initialization “FW initializing 33%”
    • slow performance after controller cache was used

    Forth and back I tried to play with the cache settings as well as HBA-mode, with no success. Updating the SUV500’s firmware on a Windows box that I luckily had around, with no success. Then I researched the problem a little and found that I am not the only one with problems in that constellation.

    And despite the forum members in some forums spreading useless, even stupid misinformation about the interoperability of enterprise- and consumer-hardware, the core truth stays the same: Somewhere in the firmware of at least one of the components there is something wrong. The complexity of reproducing and analyzing the problem deeper might make it impossible or at least very unfeasible for me.

    I went and installed another 2,5 inch SSD for the OS, some Samsung PM8xx model with 256GB. All went fine.