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Online.net Dedibox XC 2016 BIOS Bug?
exception0x876
Member, Host Rep, LIR
in General
I've ordered the Dedibox XC 2016 HDD version to use for my personal needs, but I noticed some serious slow down during filesystem creation via mkfs.ext4. So I rebooted under Rescue system just to find out the hilarious write speed of their hard drive
dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/sda1/test bs=1M count=100 conv=fdatasync 100+0 records in 100+0 records out 104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 8.3943 s, 12.5 MB/s
I should mention that the read speed was ok and always stayed at 100MB/s+. I created a support ticket and their rep said:
Online - Julien Hello, thanks for your patience. After further check, it seems like we have a BIOS bug affecting our XC. The port is not running properly (SATA II instead of SATA III) and offer lower performance that it should. Our engineering team is already working on it, and we'll deliver a patch in the coming weeks for that kind of issue. Regards, Julien V. L2 Technician @ Online.net.
I don't think that is the case though, since if that was true all other customers would experience the same issue. Is it?
Comments
I have the same "issue" on 1 of my 2 XCs. Makes it even more weird.
My XC 2016 is fine, but yeah their BIOS is buggy.
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 1.61639 s, 64.9 MB/s
Affects the SC line as well: https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/comment/1614287/#Comment_1614287
Mine SSD version works well about 260 MB/s, would be more on SATA3.
Mine is about 80MB/s, but the XC Iam cancelling can do 100MB/s
How to get 260MBps?
Mine just 175MBps on Ubuntu 14.4
It's definitely not just you; I'm having the EXACT same issue on my SC and XC servers; funny how they are both part of the 'Online.net Labs' platform. Looks like their custom designed platform has a major issue with the BIOS.
I've had this issue on two server now (They swapped me to another earlier today; same issue):
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/sda2/tmp/test1.img bs=1G count=1 oflag=dsync
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1,1 GB) copied, 26,9245 s, 39,9 MB/s
It's quite low and it seems to fluctuate a LOT, and that is in rescue mode!
Shame this wasn't something that was tested before deploying their 2016 range...
Do you get the port manifesting itself as SATA III on any other OS / OS version? There is an issue with I believe C236 chipset, SATA and CentOS 7.1, it works perfectly fine on 6.7 and 7.0 though.
The rescue system is Ubuntu 14.04 based and I used Centos 6.7 for my installation. Both have this slow speed. I think the problem is not SATA2 itself, since it should allow to push like 200MB/s without problems.
Can you check what motherboard it is ?
Stupid question; if the boards used in these servers are custom specific to Online.net, will they likely be the developers of the BIOS running on them? In other words, will the time frame which has been quoted likely be accurate?
I received a similar time-frame for a fix of a couple of weeks when contacting support. I'm very surprised this got through system testing to be honest, especially if it's custom hardware.
What is even more surprising though is I've seen a few benchmarks around from users who have the SSD version of the XC 2016 and their benchmarks are over 150MB/s.
You'd think a BIOS issue like this would affect all drive types since they all use the same interface (SATA) wouldn't you?
I just get around 60 MB/s on my SC 2016
I was thinking about getting the XC SSD this month, but this BIOS issue sounds pretty jank.
How much HDD speed do you expect in normal case? Is it about 100 MB/s ?
This is on a 10000 year old failing WD green 1TB drive
I'd say you should expect at least 100MB/s yeah.
Mine XC 2016 SSD gets 213 MB/s under load on Proxmox host machine
They've added FreeBSD in installer. How were you able to get CentOS 6.7 on this machine ? It's simply impossible...
SATA 2 has a maximum speed of 300 MB/s. That comes nowhere near explaining a drive running at 12.5 MB/s.
I installed it via a rescue system.
The support guy offered a full refund. Lets see if I will get it.
But how - there is no KVM, no graphics card Even if you move from different machine like XC SSD 2015 it boots, but disables network port immediately.
See my result:
dd bs=1M count=1000 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out 1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 4.32178 s, 243 MB/s
SATA II is limited to about 250 MB/s. You will never get 300 MB/s on SATA II. SATA III is limited to about 560 MB/s.
Which SSD's are you using ? Mine is SAMSUNG MZ7LN256HCHP-00000 256 GB.
https://www.skytale.net/blog/archives/38-Installing-CentOS-6-from-a-rescue-system.html
WOW - I didn't try that. Just asked Online.net how are they doing and they've said still no progress. Looking at the CentOS 7 boot options like "baremetal" I thought it must be something special to be able to boot.
FreeBSD is gone in the installer ;(
It worked !
Speeds are great:
[Bumping thread]
Out of interest, has anyone here gotten BIOS updates (or fixes) yet, or are the issues just being palmed off?
I haven't bothered following up with Online.net yet, but just wanted to know.