XFS: Abysmal write performance because of excessive seeking (allocation groups to blame?)

[Stefan Ring]

> Or merely a weak/old product.  The P400 was an entry level RAID HBA,
> HP's first PCIe/SAS RAID card.  It was discontinued quite some time ago.
>  The use of DDR2/533 memory indicates it's design stage started probably
> somewhere around 2004, 8 years ago.

It was what you got when you bought a direct-attach storage blade from
HP until a few months ago. Apparently, they changed it to P410i very
recently: <http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/3709945-3709945-3710114-3722820-3722776-4304942.html?dnr=1>