Re: Crystal Mark Disk Info
Sheldon Cibrian
CrystalDiskMark is an open source disk drive benchmark tool for Microsoft Windows from Crystal Dew World. Based on Microsoft's MIT-licensed Diskspd tool,[2] this graphical benchmark is commonly used for testing the performance of solid-state storage.[3][4] It works by reading and writing through the filesystem in a volume-dependent way. It generates read/write speeds in sequential and random positions with varying numbers of queues and threads.[5] Solid-state drives tend to excel at random IO, as unlike hard drives, they do not need to seek for the specific position to read from or write to.[6]
CrystalDiskInfo is an MIT-licensed S.M.A.R.T. utility for reading and monitoring disk drive status. Like CrystalDiskMark, this tool is designed with an emphasis around solid state devices, supporting NVMe connections in addition to the usual PATA and SATA. Other features include Intel RAID support, e-mail and sound warnings, and AAM/APM adjustment.[9]
Suisho Shizuku also has a crossover with Foxkonkochan (ふぉっくす紺子ちゃん),[24] a Foxconn mascot originally for authorized Foxconn Japanese dealer unistar, Inc.[25] (later Mediabank Corp (メディアバンク株式会社)) announced by the company in 2014-02-25[26]) designed by Nakano Tsukasa (永野つかさ) of e.l.fields, where both characters appear in a postcard that were included with purchases at selected stores in 2015-12-12.[27][28]
Kurei Kei (Japanese: 暮井 慧(くれいけい))/Pronama-chan (Japanese: プロ生ちゃん), a Pronama LLC mascot[29] designed by Ixyいくしー (Nareru! Systems Engineer illustrator), and voiced by Sumire Uesaka of KING RECORD CO., LTD.,[30][31] was the second mascot used in Crystal Dew World's software, introduced in CrystalDiskInfo 7.1.0 (2017-08-04).[32][33]
Virtual salesperson android Tsukumo Tokka (Japanese: バーチャル販売員アンドロイドの九十九ツクモトッカ), a Virtual Cast Shopping (Japanese: バーチャルキャストショッピング) (Project White Co., Ltd.'s online channel) mascot designed by ?,[38] was the third mascot used in Crystal Dew World's software, introduced in CrystalDiskMark 8.0.2 (2020-06-01).[17][39]
I have a SATA to USB adapter and that is about it. I can plug them in and see if Windows mounts them but that is about it. Can third party utilities check SMART data when a drive is plugged in via the adapter, if so which is a good utility or method that you use?
Crystal disk info and crystal disk Mark. Info pulls your smart data and specs, then run CD Mark to test read/write performance for any indications of mechanical issues. Takes 10 minutes tops per drive.
I am not aware that a generic USB adapter is able to check all the SMART information.
I find more convenient to connect it directly to the internal connector of the computer itself.
To manage the reliability of the hard disk, I use CrystalDiskInfo:
About CrystalDiskInfo A HDD/SSD utility software which supports a part of USB, Intel RAID and NVMe. Aoi Edition Standard Edition Shizuku Edition Kurei Kei Edition Download System Requirements OS Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10/11Windows Server...
I reinstalled several times in different configurations just to make sure it was the S110 that was the issue. Using the latest version of CrystalDiskMark (3.02f) here are the approximate numbers I'm getting on sequential reads/writes.
T320 with S110 deactivated and just running a single 500GB drive in SATA AHCI mode. 135/133 MB/Sec. This is about what I would expect from a single WD/Dell 7200 RPM drive. No problem with standard SATA AHCI.
Dell - I can't believe you ship something this bad. My preference is to figure out why it's so bad and fix the issue, but if I don't get answers soon the server will be going back to Dell. The server as it sits now is unusable. I've got 10 year old servers sitting in my salvage pile that perform better than this.
What got me started on this was the new server felt extremely sluggish during the install and config. So I tried a couple of disk benchmarks and they all showed extremely poor performance. I listed CrystalDiskMark numbers because it is widely known and used in benchmarking.
Sorry to bring up such an old thread, but were you ever able to figure out a solution to this problem? We are seeing slow performance on R220 servers with S110 controllers running RAID 1, but have no issue with our T110's. Latest drivers/firmware/bios do not seem to be of benefit.
I know this is old, but I am desperate. What ended up being the resolution to this? I am having this exact same issue today and Dell is telling me it is a hardware vs. software RAID issue, and I know it is not.
If I recall correctly I just had to wait for the background array initialization to finally complete (it may take several hours or more) and then the performance improved a bit. Download Dell OMSA (Open Manager Server Administrator) and install it on the server in question. It will allow you to monitor the progress of the Background Init process on the drive array. Once the init process is complete, you should see performance improve.
IMHO, the Dell S110 controllers are rather poor performers. They were barely adequate in performance when they were introduced and since then mechanical drives are faster and SSDs are prevalent. Sadly the S110 and associated are still being offered by Dell and the performance of these controllers is very sub par.
I now use the Dell T20 for many of my smaller Server builds. It is not saddled with the S110 controller and instead is a pure Intel RST solution. I find the Intel RST performance is about as good as it gets without a dedicated CPU for the RAID controller.
With SSD's it gets a bit higher, but you're moving substantially more data. Sequential is about 10% for the RAID-1 pair, QD=32 can be as high as 30% but it only seems to use 1-2 threads. With a 4 or 8 thread processor it does not seem to impact performance at all. In systems where I have configured a RAID-1 SSD pair along with another RAID-1 mechanical pair I'm able to run Crystal DiskMark simultaneously testing each pair and the numbers stay pretty consistent.
And please keep in mind that these numbers are from a synthetic benchmark. In the real world I've had no trouble running 4 or 5 VM's on one of these T20's, equipped with a Xeon CPU, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD's in RAID-1 along with 2 TB SATA Mechanicals also in RAID-1.
Thanks for the reply. Our server takes a full ten minutes from power on until crtl-alt-del prompt and the hard drives are constantly being hit, even with nobody on the system. I have uninstalled everything, turned off all indexing and shadow copies and the drives are still constantly active. Dell swapped the motherboard and cable to no affect, so I am not sure what we are going to do next. I am in the same situation. I have a 10 year old clone server in my scrap heap that is faster than this thing.
My experience with this issue was way more than just poor performance. As Andy mentioned, my servers were completely unusable - like running a machine pegged at 100% CPU (but hardly any CPU actually being used). I haven't looked at this since I posted. We ended up forcing Dell to replace the servers with ones that included the low end hardware raid controller option. They run fine. I hoped/assumed it was a driver issue that Dell would have solved by now (been over a year). Unfortunately it looks like Dell has not released a newer driver for the S110 controller for Server 2012. If I remember right, Server 2008R2 ran fine - it was just Server 2012 that was horrible. Maybe try the latest BIOS (Dec 2015)?
Yes, because SANS are set up in different ways and also have different hardware. Some SANS have 1 disk controller, others have multiples. Also, it depends on how the LUNS are set up and a variety of other things that I only have the barest whisper of knowledge about.
If you google about SQL Server and SAN, you should get a bunch of articles (some good, some questionable) to read. And just googling SAN alone should get you information on how they are set up and created.
There's a very specific set of articles on SQL Server and LUN setups somewhere that I cannot find or remember the titles of that could help you out. I'm going to call in some reinforcements from another thread and see if anyone there has information that would help you improve your numbers.
This is a brand new SAN (2 controllers, cant be used for multipathing but can do the ozar suggestion of say log file data down controller A and data down controller B with 2 hbas using FC). onto a 6 disk SAS 15k RAID 10 no other data was on the network..
Yeah that seems like a great to super numbers, but apparently our SAN dosnt handle true multipathing. As i said above (Think i wrote it same time as you replie :D) im trying to help things by using both controllers and both of the Servers HBAs to get a bit more out of it..
There are all sorts of config options that can have an effect. What's the stripe size? How much cache does the controller (or do the controllers) have, and is it battery backed? If it's battery backed, how have you configured the balance between read cache and write cache space? What are you measuring as reads/writes - something defined in teh disc config, or SQL Server pages, or what? What interfacte do you have from the server to the controller(s)?
I ran the test 5 times on each LUNs last night (Only possible outside effect to scew results is data being sent on the same switch to the SAN from Servers (I have a RAID1, RAID 10 with 6 disks and a RAID 10 with 8 disks). Results are below:
In RAID 1 (mirroring without parity or striping), data is written identically to multiple disks (a "mirrored set"). While any number of disks may be used, many implementations deal with only 2.[citation needed] The array continues to operate as long as at least one drive is functioning. With appropriate operating system support, there can be increased read performance, and only a minimal write performance reduction; implementing RAID 1 with a separate controller for each disk in order to perform simultaneous reads (and writes) is sometimes called multiplexing (or duplexing when there are only 2 disks).
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