4 disk RAID5 running too slow - pls help!

james32 · 8 Mar 2007 at 02:55

hers mine with a 3 disk array 3 x 750gb
red = raid 0
blue = raid 5

dan_aka_jack · 8 Mar 2007 at 09:03

Hi James,

Thanks for the reply. What RAID card do you have? And what mobo and processor?

Thanks,
Jack

Five_Star · 8 Mar 2007 at 18:13

dan_aka_jack said:
Quick update:

Does anyone have any experience with WinXP software RAID setups? The TomsHardware guide above recommends the setup.

Jack

I did have 4x200Gb Western Digital drives in XP software RAID 5 until last year and managed about 100MB/s in reads. Only had one drive fail in that time and the swap over replacement was easy, it just took a long time to rebuild!

The only downside of Software RAID5 in XP is you can't grow the array to add more disks without first breaking it and recreating with the additional disks and on a large array such as 3x750GB thats a lot of backup space.

dan_aka_jack · 8 Mar 2007 at 18:20

Thanks for the reply.

Five_Star said:
I did have 4x200Gb Western Digital drives in XP software RAID 5 until last year and managed about 100MB/s in reads.

What sort of write speeds were you getting on your RAID5 array?

james32 · 8 Mar 2007 at 20:42

dan_aka_jack said:
Hi James,

Thanks for the reply. What RAID card do you have? And what mobo and processor?

Thanks,
Jack

thats the Intel ich7r onboard
i dont no what writes are because hd tach dont show that

specs
badaxe 2
6400 @ 3.2
2gb of ram

Five_Star · 8 Mar 2007 at 21:29

dan_aka_jack said:
Thanks for the reply.

What sort of write speeds were you getting on your RAID5 array?

it wasn't great as they were IDE disks. 2 via the motherboard and 2 via a PCI on single channel cables. Speeds were about 6MB-8MB but it was just for long term sotrage.

dan_aka_jack · 8 Mar 2007 at 21:52

james32 said:
thats the Intel ich7r onboard
i dont no what writes are because hd tach dont show that

Wow - 120MB/sec with an onboard RAID5 controller. That's impressive.

Methanoid · 19 Jun 2007 at 08:03

dan_aka_jack said:
Wow - 120MB/sec with an onboard RAID5 controller. That's impressive.

I wonder what write speeds are for a single drive (of the type he uses) and for the RAID5 array on the ICH7R.

dan_aka_jack · 19 Jun 2007 at 10:05

Methanoid said:
I wonder what write speeds are for a single drive (of the type he uses) and for the RAID5 array on the ICH7R.

I've tried using 4 x 500GB WD drives on an ICH9R (P35 chipset) with a 2.1GHz quad-core processor. Read speeds were very impressive (something like 200MB/sec) but write speeds were only 20MB per sec. (I'm now running a RAID 10 array on an ICH9R)

Thanks,
Jack

JackRegan · 20 Jun 2007 at 12:49

I Have 4 x 500Gb Seagate 7200.10's in my Server running RAID 5. It was oringinally RAID 1 until I bought another 2 drives (this week only offer) and converted to RAID 5 using Intel Matrix Storeage. Took about 4-5 hours to rebuild.

The spec is, E6320, DS3P, 2Gb Geil PC6400C4 and the os is on a 36Gb 8mb raptor.

HD Tach

Intel Matrix

Jack