2

I have been saddled with some servers with crap Dell H310 and H330 controllers (which don't have BBWC and provide about 15mb/sec write performance on spinning disks).

I can upgrade the controllers to H710's (which do have a BBWC, but most likely require a rebuild as they apparently require a RAID setup, while I'm using software RAID), switch to SSD's or both.

Is there a substantial IO performance increase when using BBWC on SSD's ? (I note that the system I have running an H310 and SSD's performs hugely faster - I'm not sure if switching to a BBWC based controller on that system will help significantly, and I'm trying to ascertain where to upgrade from spinning disks to SSD and where to upgrade the controllers)

davidgo
  • 6,504

2 Answers2

6

Battery-backed write cache allows you to acknowledge writes as soon as they're received into cache. This is faster than SSD. It won't help you on reads, though, and any time your cache is full and the client is still writing, you'll go back down to the speed of the disk.

If your workload is in any way read intensive (database, file server, applications), then prioritize SSD over a new card. If it's infrequent writes that could be absorbed by a battery-backed write cache, then prioritize that. The ideal would be both.

Basil
  • 8,931
2

You should have controllers capable of BBWC/FBWC even if you're using SSD.

But specifics matter. What disks? What specific controllers? What's the performance requirement?

ewwhite
  • 201,205