Question: I am seeing only 50MB/s reads:

```
ensnare@box:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda
[sudo] password for ensnare:

/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   4592 MB in  2.00 seconds = 2296.48 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  192 MB in  3.90 seconds =  49.24 MB/sec

```

The array is already rebuilt and operational. Is this kind of slow performance normal? Anything I can do to make it faster? There weren't too many options in the controller configuration. Thanks.

Answer: 
The short answer is yes, that's the level of performance you should expect to see from the H200.

The long answer: The H200 is the old SAS 6iR with SATA 6Gb/s support. It doesn't have the usual features you'd see on a RAID card (battery backup unit, onboard caching, RAID5/6 support). The cache determines how fast your RAID array is (along w/ the # of spindles and type of drive), so no cache = slow performance. Add the 7200RPM SATA drives (which are slow compared to a 10-15k RPM SAS drive) and that's the level of performance you can expect.
The H200 controller disables all disk caching built into the drives by default. 

If the server has battery backup you can enable basic drive caching on the Logical Volumes without risk.

Goto www.LSI.com (The controller is made by LSI) and download and install MegaRAID Storage Manager.

Highlight the Virtual Raid Volume, right click, properties. Enable Cache and save.

You have to do this on every logical raid volume.

Your performance difference is incredible.