Hard Drive Testing

[tps]

I am testing a batch of 20 hard drives. They are Seagate ST31000424SS 1TB SAS drives. The drives are attached to an LSI 9201-16e SAS HBA to Windows 7 Professional with BiT 7.0 Professional. I am running sequential tests on all the drives simultaneously. All the drives will begin writing at around 100MB/sec. Somewhere in the second hour of testing, all the drives suddenly dropped down to about 1.8MB/sec. My CPU and memory usage is next to nothing (the only thing happening on the test station is this HDD test). I am wondering if there are any issues with trying to run this many drives on BiT at the same time.

Respectfully

[David (PassMark)]

We aren't aware of any issue with BurnInTest.

Are the drives almost full at this point? Maybe they'll get faster again on the next cycle (once the test files are deleted and the test starts with an empty drive again).

I would also suggest re testing with just 1 drive, then 5, then 10 just as an experiment.

How do you attach 20 drives to the 16 port LSI controller?

[tps]

The drives are installed in an AIC XJ3000-3163 JBOD enclosure and cabled to one of the exterior ports on the HBA. With the exception of specifying the sequential test, I am using the default test settings. Based on my reading of the manual, each cycle of the hard drive represents a single write/verify cycle on a file 1% of the drive size (10GB in this case). I am going to check on the drives now - they have been running overnight. I ran a quick one hour test yesterday with all 20 drives and they ran great. Thanks for the reply!

[tps]

I restarted the test and watch the performance of the drives. They went through cycle 0 at ~110MB/s. About 30% into Cycle 1, they all started dropping down to 1.8MB/s. I changed the file size parameter for the test to be .5% and am observing to see if that makes a difference. One note I didn't mention before, these drives are unformatted drives with no partitions on them. I will let you know how it goes. Respectfully