NVME Disk Problems in ESXI

computerwiz123 · March 26, 2019

I've recently got a new NVME ssd for my dell poweredge r420. I've got it sat in a Startech 3 port PCI-E card. It works great, I can create datastores etc in ESXI and virtual machines are extremely fast. However, when I run a crystaldiskmark benchmark on it the disk errors and shows up in ESXI with 0B. Rebooting the host resolves the problem.

Something I've noticed is that If I run just two tests on Crystaldiskmark, it doesn't stop working and shows the expected speeds (Excess of 3000MB/s). Except for the server all the kit is new so I think a faulty part may be rare in this case but I'm not sure if anyone here has had a similar issue.

Here's the hardware I'm using inside the R420.

PCI-E Card: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01IR05DLK/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

NVME SSD: https://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-Black-High-Performance-NVMe-Internal/dp/B07BR9FV1C/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=wd+black+nvme&qid=1553626096&s=electronics&sr=1-3

Salv8 (sam) · March 26, 2019

Crystaldiskmark might just be having a spaz, it's not really meant to run in a virtual environment since it expects more psychical disk access then it's given it doesn't know what to do, so it compensates and doesn't do it's job properly.

if you really want to test the speed it's common practice just to copy a large file and many small files (exactly what Crystaldiskmark does, but your doing it manually) since disk performance software doesn't give an actuate result since it actually contributes to disk usage when it shouldn't, a file transfer just copy the file and nothing else, no checking disk functions, no IO crap, just copying the file.

if you want to record your results for future reference, then a file copy utility that uses the in-built copy crap in windows (or whatever OS your running in the VM) will do nicely so long as it doesn't try and do other crap in the background such as IO crap