Help with slow SSD RAID (Plenty of pics)

The-Plethora · 15 Aug 2012 at 20:30

Hope you guys can help. I have been running a RAID 0 setup with 2 X 74GB Raptors for several years and whilst they still perform very well I decided to upgrade my setup to a SSD RAID now prices have dropped.

In preperation I made an image of my Raptor windows install and saved it using Acronis ready to install to the new SSDs.

My motherboard is a fairly pedestrial Asus P5e deluxe which has 6 x SATA ports, 2 of which are in use with DVD drives and a further 2 storage drives leaving my 2 for the Raptor RAID.

Here is the board..

I know as the board is running SATA 2 ports that I am going to be limiting myself in the speed I can use until I get a SATA 3 controller money permitting.
Here are the details the manual gives for the onboard SATA controller...

Overclockers give the following read and write speeds for the two kingston drives I have bought.

- Max Read: 535MB/s
- Max Write: 480MB/s

Therefore I figure running 2 drives on 2 SATA 2 ports it would not be unreasonable to expect a throughput of around 500MB/s?

Hard disk tune says otherwise though...

Theres not many options in the BIOS for SATA config...

I have it set as RAID to configure the disks, I read that setting as RAID also combines AHCI after searching the net, besides which I wouldnt be able to configure otherwise.

Here is the config for the Intel RAID controller...

As you can see I have my 2 Kingston SSDs in RAID (SSD RAID C) and the other 2 hard disks show up also. The combined size of 223GB would indicate that all is well.

Back in disk manager in Windows again all looks good...

And Intel storage recognises the RAID also...

I am running the latest motherboard BIOS and drivers for the controller. The drives are running the restored image of the Windows setup I made from the raptor install using Acronis, I can't see anything wrong with that as thats what Acronis is designed to do and not had problems restoring to RAID arrays in the past.

Can anyone suggest anything else?

hyperst · 15 Aug 2012 at 21:07

Try a different bench mark, it really depends on the disks you have purchased as some manufactures use different benchmark programs, try AS SSD bench, sata 2 speeds max out below or around 300mb a sec so you will all ways be below 300mb on sata2 just so you know.

The-Plethora · 15 Aug 2012 at 21:11

I'll try another benchmark but as they are in RAID 0 and so on seperate channels won't I have a theoretical bandwidth of up to 600? Not that I expect to get that with overhead etc.

hyperst · 15 Aug 2012 at 21:21

The-Plethora said:
I'll try another benchmark but as they are in RAID 0 and so on seperate channels won't I have a theoretical bandwidth of up to 600? Not that I expect to get that with overhead etc.

Not sure tbh, maybe, I see you have the kingston drives, if there sandforce based controller you're best to try the above mentioned AS SSD benchmark to see

The-Plethora · 15 Aug 2012 at 21:41

Ok cheers, yes I get much better results using that, see below...

The drives just don't feel that fast, the improvement over the raptors seems quite slight.

hyperst · 16 Aug 2012 at 00:04

My bad, you want ATTO Bench32 to put them through there paces

BarKeep · 16 Aug 2012 at 00:40

The problem is the: '31 K - BAD'

SSD Alignment

BarKeep · 16 Aug 2012 at 01:15

I'm just preparing my old rig to pass on.........

Its a P5E Deluxe with a Kingston Hyper X 128GB SSD. Run AS SSD on it:

Kaapstad · 16 Aug 2012 at 01:20

Its a long time since I ran an SSD RAID0 setup but if I remember right you should be looking for about 480 mb/s read and write from a sata 2 setup.

Also someone correct me if I am wrong but in Intel Matrix Storage Console next to "Volume Write Back Cache Enabled" select Yes.

As mentioned earlier you need to run ATTO Disk Benchmark Bench 32. This will give a good idea what speeds your getting.

Kaapstad · 16 Aug 2012 at 01:52

BarKeep said:
The problem is the: '31 K - BAD'

SSD Alignment

That looks a bit worrying I have not seen that before.

To the OP

In the pic below are AS SSD and ATTO benchmarks.

If you compare Seq in AS SSD to the last pair of values in ATTO you will notice the Read/Write figures in ATTO are higher. Manufacturers often quote figures from ATTO.

hyperst · 16 Aug 2012 at 02:09

BarKeep said:
The problem is the: '31 K - BAD'

SSD Alignment

Ahh, yes it could be that and because they were cloned and not a fresh install which usually gets it correct.

Clav · 16 Aug 2012 at 08:58

hyperst said:
Ahh, yes it could be that and because they were cloned and not a fresh install which usually gets it correct.

This is exactly right. I can't see the screenshots so I don't know which version of windows you have. If it is 7 then it will automatically detect an SSD and optimise it accordingly. If it is XP you will need to manually align the partition yourself using gparted or some other tool.

no_1_dave · 16 Aug 2012 at 12:57

Clav said:
This is exactly right. I can't see the screenshots so I don't know which version of windows you have. If it is 7 then it will automatically detect an SSD and optimise it accordingly. If it is XP you will need to manually align the partition yourself using gparted or some other tool.

Windows 7 wont do that from a clone install though.
It will only detect & setup the SSD on a fresh windows install.

The-Plethora · 16 Aug 2012 at 18:31

OK I have run ATTO, I should explain I am currently running Vista X64, I know theres the option for going to 7 but really Vista for all it's bad press does everything I want and with 8 just round the corner it seems like hassle.

Here is ATTO

That looks fairly good and getting approx 520mb/s but still it doesnt feel a huge upgrade. The pic I attached earlier...

With the 31K bad bit, from what I read in the link barkeep provided it seems vista is not an issue. But does that mean Vista is not an issue if you install onto the SSD array from scratch or it IS an issue if you restore a cloned disk.
Thanks for the help with this so far guys. If I can avoid a re-install it would be handy. When these utilities are benchmarking the disk is it essentially creating and deleting files where as the existing files I have on the disk appear fragmented?

BarKeep · 16 Aug 2012 at 19:15

Clean install > OK
Cloned > OK if done with something like Trueimage 2012 for a single boot drive.

I've no idea if you can clone a RAID from HDD to SSD and get the SSD Alignment correct, or if you can correct it after cloning. Google is your friend.

Kaapstad · 16 Aug 2012 at 21:01

When it comes to installing windows I allways do a clean install. It may take longer but it gets rid of/avoids a lot of problems.

BarKeep · 16 Aug 2012 at 21:13

Kaapstad said:
When it comes to installing windows I allways do a clean install. It may take longer but it gets rid of/avoids a lot of problems.

+1