Re: slow disk response

hi Andyve,

You're welcome and appreciate your sharing feedback so that all my
learn from each other's experience.

Your license question: if the SBS license is OEM, then you can't transfer
as it is attached to the PC/server. If it was a retail box or OpenLicense
source, then you can transfer SBS2k to another h/w. Same for the SBS CALs.

H/w compatibility - I don't think it's a compatibility issue between the
mobo's standard IDE adaptor and Win/SBS2k. This adaptor is a standard
si even the generic drivers will work in all cases, performance optimisation
may be available with a specific mobo's drivers together with the mobo's
BIOS. It's likely that the addin HD adaptor is incompatible with the mobo's
BIOS (taking over the same I/O port), the mobo's BIOS needs updating,
or the patch to the SBS OS affected detection - the latter is likely to be
MBR related.

But in any case, you're likely to get very limited performance mileage
using a 'normal' HD adaptor. To see noticeable improvement, you need
to invest in a caching RAID-adaptor, preferably with it's own CPU.
Spreading the I/O load over several HD helps and RAID also enables
redundancy. You can consider using 3xRAID1 (3x2 HD) for boot, DB,
Exchange, or 1xRAID1 (2HD) and 1x RAID10 (4 HD) for boot and
DB + Exchange.

I can relate to your experience because I've upgraded a customer's
SBS2k box from using the internal IDE, to addin card, to 2-channel h/w
(3ware) RAID adaptor and now they're using 8-port SATA adaptor
with smoking good performance.

HTH,
Eugene Tan
SBS MVP

===============================
"Andyve" <Andyve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:C0E7CAC8-2D53-42A8-9481-7CFFA0ACBEF0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
hi Eugene,

i feel terrible i have not got back to you sooner but i have been testing
with various options and it is suffuce to say that the add on controller
card
only helped a little bit (using the same indicators the results were
marginally higher - even using a SATA hdd off the same add on card) for
the
data drive, the boot drive is not detected in the bios via the add on
card.
we came to the conclusion that it is the incompatibility between SBS 2k
and
the pc mobo.

i have recommended that we install an HP G2/3 server with SATA drives and
a
gigabit lan. perhaos one last question, do you know if i could carry the
licences over / upgrade them from sbs 2k to sbs 2k3?

thank you for you generous contribution, the lessons i learnt here will
help
me in the future. once i have the new server up i will add a note to this
thread and let you know how it is going, but agaian thank you for your
time
and patience.

Andy

"Eugene Tan" wrote:

hi Andyve,

There are number of issues being discussed, so hopefully I can convey
it in an organised manner.

I hope you've read this article before applying the hotfix.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305098

The mobo bios needs to be 48-bit aware before you apply the hotfix.
You shd apply the servicepack, apply the hotfix, then migrate/ghost to
a hard drive that supports >137GB otherwise there may be trouble.

The mobo is 4 years old, it is a PC mobo, so performance won't be
great with PATA HD and mobo driver is unlikely to improve things much.
Your 2 HD, there shd NOT be on the same IDE cable as this affects
performance.

But your solution should move away from this for better and reliable
performance.

Since you didn't monitor, performance may have already been slow,
and with additional patches, AV etc, it can drop below a certain
threshold that creates problems and timeouts.

There is enough ram, CPU is usually quite light, but the bottleneck
is the HD so the DB apps can't get data out quickly enough. This
problem may appear worse on a faster CPU (fast CPU on slow HD).

The problem is that the I/O volume is too high for PATA, the normal
controller and PATA HD.

I believe a multi-channel RAID adaptor will help. Preferably go with
a SATA adaptor, and use true h/w ones rather than the cheap s/w
ones without their own CPU, but they are more costly.

But you should consider this against the loss of data. Choose RAID1
or RAID10 - the latter for better performance and it needs at least 4
HD. Spreading out the load on several HD will improve performance.
The brands I'd consider are 3ware, Adaptec, and certain models of
Promise and HighPoint's RocketRAID. The latter 2 have models
which use s/w and the host CPU, I'd avoid these models.

HTH,
Eugene Tan
SBS MVP

===============================
"Andyve" <Andyve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:6E115DF9-3CD4-4631-87D9-46C496F6FAD6@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
hi Eugene,

the pc is a clone and not a true server, intel based but a clone
anyway.
the
sbs is not a new installation per say, it is the original one except
that
i
replaced the boot drive in august last year and used Ghost to set up
the
new
drive. i do not remember the slow issue before and this has arisen
mainly
because the Pastel support is saying the "server" is slow. pastel is
not
runnign from the server except the pervasive database engine as well as
sql
for msx. these do nto however seem to take up too much resources. the
pastel
data is sitting on the data drive which is identical to the boot drive.
i
have only now applied the enablebiglba tool to set the registry
correctly
that allows sbs2k to see the full drive, it only seen 127Gb
previousely.
the
idicators are the same before the big lba was enabled and afterwards.
there are no apps per say running on the "Server", only msx, trend a-v,
and
the pervasive db engine. the cpu usage idles most of the time but the
mem
usage is normally quite high, just under a gig free most of the time,
from
the db engine and sql i would imagine.
the kb's say that write cache must be removed and you are saying it
should
be enabled, just a query? it was enabled and i removed it and the
indicators
did not change.
i am sure i can uninstall the mobo driver but am concerned it may
corrupt
the data on the boot drive. i am going to try a pci ide controller card
today, maybe it is the mobo onboard controller is not so great? i ran
the
seatools test yesterday and with both the short and long tests, both
the
drives passed. i do not know if it tests the sequential write at all as
the
tool does not have a report as such.
i do agree regarding the use of performance tools but had nothing else
to
test with. is there a tool that tests specifically for i/o speed? again
it
is
not a true server and i understand the issue of sbs being tuned for
server
and not app performance.
the mobo is about 4 years old and there is a new bios version available
but
i typically do not like flashing the bios, i have had bad results from
doin
this on servers. is the controller drivers in the bios as i do not see
seperate driver for them in the mobo updates? should i look for
specific
controller drivers first and then try and apply them?
there does not appear to be a turning point where it was working better
before as opposed to now, only the pastel support say so that pastel is
slow
when running from the server - this when they have opened pastel on the
server for whatever reason. there has never been a slow issue before
and
now
that data appears to be getting "lost", pastel support is blaming the
server.
i use "appears to be getting lost" as there is a new accountant and she
blames the server being slow all the time (maybe because she cannot her
job
properly or is very slow herself) and pastel have latched onto this as
an
excuse??
do you think a h/w raid is really necessary and will it speed up the
disk
i/o that much? if i had multiple data drives i would agree but with
only
one
boot and one data, then tend to think it is not required?
i am sorry if the reply is all over the place and not in sequence with
your
questions, my thoughts tend to run away while i am writing ang i get
side
tracked!!
i will try the pci controller first and get back to you. at least there
shld
be drivers for the card and that way will eliminated the onboard
controller /
driver.
thks for the help, it is appreciated.
Andy

"Eugene Tan" wrote:

hi Andy,

Sorry for late reply, I had PC issue when doing my original reply.

It looks like you're are using a PC mobo for SBS. RAM and CPU are
sufficient for SBS2k unless you're running some heavy apps.
Your HDs shd be ok, but note that PATA hard drives run slower
relative to SATA or a RAID.

I don't think it's a SP issue or disk.sys. You typically shd have DMA
enabled (but this really depends on the mobo) and write cached
enabled,
otherwise things will be slow. You should typically apply the latest
mobo drivers but not blindly - with SP4, that may have the latest h/w
driver for standard hardware. Is there a way to uninstall the mobo
driver that you applied?

My experience with a PC box, running SBS2000sp4 on a normal PATA
controller is that the box will be very slow. Lots of ram will reduce
file
swap IO a bit, but as a server there will be lots of I/O writing to
Exchange
and just being a file server. Even when using a 'RAID' controller on
a
PC mobo, which tend to be s/w RAID, performance is slow or sometimes
crashes. I'd suggest a true hardware RAID from Adaptec or 3ware if
you're concerned about slow IO on a server, and you should be.

Is this a new SBS install? If so, reinstalling may be better if you
can't
uninstall the mobo driver (if this is older).

Regarding performance, was there something that changed that resulted
in performance becoing slow or is this a new install? It is not
appropriate
to compare benchmarks on PC with a server, esp. if you install SBS
as there're many more processes running on SBS - it is tuned to
provide
server services rather than app performance.

Eugene Tan
SBS MVP









"Andyve" <Andyve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:A6141A5E-DE85-4BB9-B618-F23A324C3CD6@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
sorry Eugene, the box is a 2.8GHz and has 2Gb RAM.

"Eugene Tan" wrote:

hi Andy,

Pls tell me more about your SBS box. What type of hard drives and
how
configured? Using any RAID or just the IDE on the mainboard? Are
the
HD partitioned? How old are the HD?

I wouldn't advise replacing drivers .sys using command line, and
chances
are it will not work/be alowed. You shd use the driver for Win2000
to
update the hardware, depends on what you're using for the HD
adaptor.

When you mention slow, pls tell me more - is the drive timing out?
Are you comparing to previous performance or to a PC?

Eugene Tan
SBS MVP

=============================
"Andyve" <Andyve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:CDF915DE-EFB6-4467-917E-285A7F79A5DA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
i have sbs 2000 installed with sp4 and am having an issue with
slow
disk
response. the kb's say to ensure the drive is on a seperate ultra
ata
ribbon
cable (done that) and to check bios (done that) check advanced
properties
for
dma enabled (done that) and it is still the same. i found some
info
on
disk.sys causing the hdd to slow donw with wrtie cache enabled. i
have
removed that (i have a ups on the server to ensure the data is
not
corrupted
with a crash / loss of power) still the same. however i have
checked
the
date
and tried to update the hdd driver (disk.sys) and the date is
1999
and
the
update says it finds a newer driver and installs but the date is
the
same.
i
have seen disk.sys files shown in various kb's with dates as new
as
2005,
even the i386 original disks show 2001.
QUESTION: can i just copy the newer disk.sys to the
wnnt\system32\drivers
directory without the chance of the data being corrupted?
QUESTION: sp4 will not re-apply, it says sp already applied. how
can
i
re-apply sp4 without removing it first and then running the risk
of
other
newer programs installed not working properly?

i hope some guru out there can help, especially since sbs 2000 is
not
supported anymore!!











.

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