Very Slow Writing Spead with a RAID5 configuration.

[oliver_ssa]

Ok guys so this is a little weird.

I just set up a RAID5 configuration with 08 X 3Tb Drives Seagate Barracuda ST3000DM001.

Here are my system specs:

Intel Mother board S1200BTLR
Intel Processor XEON E3-1220V2 3.10 8Mb
Intel Raid Controller RS2WC080 (RAID5)
8Gb Kingston KVR1333D3S8E9SK2/4G
Thermaltake PSU TRX-1000M

So i set everything up at the RAID Controller Bios, the array was successfully created, on windows 7 i installed the Raid drivers correctly and then i ran Atto bench mark i got this very weird results.



Write speeds i got only 30MB and read speed almost 1000MB.

Am i doing something wrong?

[lowfat]

Do you have write caching enabled? It should be located in Intel Rapid Storage Technology control panel.

[BlueByte]

update the firmware on the mobo an RAID controller. Its amazing how often that fixes things.

[oliver_ssa]

Originally Posted by lowfat

Do you have write caching enabled? It should be located in Intel Rapid Storage Technology control panel.

Hey, yes it is enable. I saw it that when enable it could affect performance, but i couldn't disable it on the Controller menu.

And i updated both bios and its all good.

Any other thoughts?

Thx, guys.

[Perineum]

it really sounds like write caching is not enabled.

[BlueByte]

Make sure your cache is setup with the following;

Write Policy: Write Back
Read Policy: Adaptive Read Ahead
Cache Policy: Direct I/O

If it that I would break your RAID and test with 3 drives at a time in RAID 5. While you are at it, do a full surface scan of your drives as you cycle through them. Might be a bad drive.

[JD]

This looks like the low-end LSI cards, it likely does not have hardware XOR ("RAID Engine") so RAID5 is always going to have terrible write speeds. It also lacks any onboard cache as well. This is a HBA product rather than a ROC product.

I would suggest doing RAID10 instead and just suck up some of the storage loss. You'll get the performance at least. Otherwise, look into buying a proper RAID controller.

My only other thought, was the array fully initialized? That should take a couple days at your capacity.

[supaflyx3]

If you want speed and redundancy use RAID10.

[oliver_ssa]

Originally Posted by JD

This looks like the low-end LSI cards, it likely does not have hardware XOR ("RAID Engine") so RAID5 is always going to have terrible write speeds. It also lacks any onboard cache as well. This is a HBA product rather than a ROC product.

I would suggest doing RAID10 instead and just suck up some of the storage loss. You'll get the performance at least. Otherwise, look into buying a proper RAID controller.

My only other thought, was the array fully initialized? That should take a couple days at your capacity.

Thx, guys for all the tips, best feedback forum there is, i can tell you that!

Ok, i called Intel and the guy said some bullshit that the raid card wasn't test it with that specific server board and all, just pissed me off. I don't know if the drive is full initialized, would i be able to move files to the array if they haven't been? I'm copying some files to it and its 28MB/s tops, like the ATTO bench says.

[oliver_ssa]

Ok, guys so i entered my Controller settings and i notice some things

1- Its saying that the Virtual Drive is in a Background Initialization Progress, i don't understand why and its been one day that i set that up and is still in 0%? So something is not right.

2- The array is set to Write Through, but i remember that i couldn't set to Write back at the time. And as you guys can see the disk cache is enable.

3- If i could understand a little more about RAID and all i could tweak this thing around but i'm just afraid to do so.

Here are some screens of the settings, i haven't change a thing on it.

If you guys could give me any tips to Tweak this thing around i'd be in debt forever