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I've been searching around and struggling to find out of a H310 Mini or a H200 will run Samsung 840/850 Pros.

I know Dell have their officially branded SSDs, but unfortunately cost is a major issue in this project, and the project is only a short term run.

If not, what SSDs will work with the H310 Mini or H200? Anecdotal responses are fine.

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To give an anecdotal response; the 840 Pro did work on the H310 when I tried them.

The problem is, especially the firmware of the H310 has a ridiculous low queue depth preset and because of this may (depending on your work load) suffer from a terrible I/O performance.

You have a chance to change that, through cross-flashing the controller to get rid of the PERC firmware. The controller is an OEM version of the LSI SAS 2008 and can be reflashed to LSI mode (queue depth 600 if I remember correctly). Another possibility is to get a proper controller (PERC H700/H710 for example) - those also work with the 840.

EDIT

Here is a good comparison between various controller queue depths. The H310 has a queue depth of 25, while for example the H700 has a queue depth of 975.

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  • Thanks for your reply! I read on this page about flashing non Dell IR firmware onto the card that puts the queue depth up to 600. This is still a bit beyond my understanding (I'm more software than hardware), but would this directly improve that I/O? I've just been doing some reading on queue depth, and it appears each SSD would have a queue depth of 32. I plan to run 2 SSDs in RAID 1, so this would be 64. So this leaves 90% "queue capacity", if I understand correctly? Apr 11, 2016 at 14:00
  • Also, queue depth of 25 by default... Wow. I can see why these cards have such poor performance! Thanks for helping me actually understand what queue depth is! Apr 11, 2016 at 14:01
  • Also based on that - if I understand correctly - I could run 18 SATA based drives (i.e. SSDs) on that card when flashed to a 600 queue depth without any card related bottlenecking? Are there other factors at play here, or is it purely queue depth? Apr 11, 2016 at 14:10
  • @AndrewWhite The H310 only supports 16 drives per volume - but yes, from a theoretical standpoint your math would be right. It's hard to generalize. This all depends on your custom workload and I doubt you would reach such high queue depths. Regarding bottlenecks, in general the H200/H310 is an entry level-controller - for example it also suffers from poor write-performance with any parity-based RAID volumes and with synchronous I/O (just google "h310 performance issues"). The queue depth is only one factor in I/O performance.
    – s1lv3r
    Apr 11, 2016 at 15:25

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