Intel P3700 blinking orange led

[GGil]

Hi All,

I've recently bought Intel's P3700 800GB SSD to our Lenovo x3650 M5 (E5-2630 v3 dual CPU) server, running Ubuntu.

Performance is not as high as it suppose to be - hdparm -tT --direct shows around 1.6GB/sec. The same drive on a friends PC shows the 2.8GB/sec it suppose to be.

While trying to debug it I've noticed that the first orange led is blinking steadily - half a second on, half a second off, etc... It is starting when Ubuntu is booting even when the drive is not mounted so there is no traffic.

I tried to shutdown the server and unplug the power sources - but no luck there.

After installing the disk i ran dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/nvme0n1 bs=1M oflag=direct, like it suggested in the NVMe Driver Reference Guide - maybe I put the SSD is some kind of bad state?

Any other ideas? Maybe firmware? how do I find out which firmware I have? Unfortunately Intel does not support Ubuntu for the SSD Data Center Tool.

I'm do not know if the blinking causes the performance issue, but it is odd.

Thanks,

Gil.

[idata]

Hello,

The SSD model, server, configuration and test settings are all important for performance results. If the conditions are not the same, then we would expect different results. The advertised values are noted in pages 10-11 of the http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/product-specifications/ssd-dc-p3700-spec... P3700 product specifications.

Make sure that the drive is preconditioned, since that also has an impact in the performance results.

It is advised to check with Lenovo for any BIOS updates as well.

Here are some existing threads and reference documents about NVME* drive performance:

/thread/76405 Anyone measured the performance of NVMe PCIe 750 SSD using fio under Linux?

/thread/56790 Intel DC P3700 400GB SSD Poor performance on linux system

http://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/ssdc/hpssd/ssd-750/sb/intel_ssd_750_series_... http://www.intel.com/content/dam/support/us/en/documents/ssdc/hpssd/ssd-750/sb/intel_ssd_750_series_...

http://itpeernetwork.intel.com/how-to-benchmark-ssds-with-fio-visualizer/ http://itpeernetwork.intel.com/how-to-benchmark-ssds-with-fio-visualizer/

JB

[GGil]

What do you mean by "preconditioned"?

But the conditions are the same between both SSDs I have tested. And still, why that orange led is blinking?

[idata]

Preconditioning is a process used to pre-fill the drive with data before the actual test. The test results vary from drive to drive depending on the type of data they have. This is explained with detail in the links we provided before.

Regarding the activity LED (1, amber), it blinks if the drive is used, so this is not indication of a problem. The activity LED may blink with a different pattern depending on the motherboard and the way it handles interaction with the PCIe NVME drives.Please refer to the related threads and docs for details about performance testing and let us know in case you have any further questions.

[idata]

Hello,

We have not received any update since our last post. Feel free to let us know if you require further assistance.JB