AMD SB750 Based Raid 5 - Speed Advise

gamesaregood · 2 Nov 2010 at 21:23

Hello All,

I've recently put together something I've been meaning to do for ages which consists of:

Asus M4A79XTD Evo Motherboard (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-366-AS&groupid=701&catid=5&subcat=1481)

6x Samsung SpinPoint F2 EcoGreen 1.5TB (http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-080-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1279)

I've set them up in Raid 5 but I'm unsure if the performance I'm experiencing is as good as I should be.

I left all the raid settings as default and I'm not sure if this was the right thing to do, the Stripe is set to 64k and I've checked that the write cache is enabled.

I've copied a bit of data to it already but if recreating it with a larger stripe is going to see a worthwhile increase in performance then I would be happy to do that.

When copying to it its about 50 MB/ sec which is not too bad but I was hoping from my Samsung F1 1TB it would be a bit higher... am I expecting too much?

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Michael

rpstewart · 2 Nov 2010 at 21:48

50Mb/s writes are pretty decent for a non accelerated motherboard RAID5 controller. The read speeds aren't too bad but HDTach does seems to use a fairly small block size which doesn't tend to give a good reflection of the true speed of a large array. HDTune let's you tweak the size of the blocks it reads and can give a better view on the actual array speed.

Methanoid · 2 Dec 2010 at 23:11

My RAID5 on Intel P55 is ****e for speed. 17mb write and 25 read... sure something must be wrong. 6x2tb Samsung HD204UI HDDs. Anyone help with some ideas? The OP gets miles better speed.

gamesaregood · 2 Dec 2010 at 23:16

Ouch! What block size etc have you set?

Methanoid · 3 Dec 2010 at 09:13

Stripe 64k (default) and block size at default. These are the new drives with 4k rather than 512byte sectors IIRC, but thats so bad I am looking at other solutions!

gamesaregood · 3 Dec 2010 at 12:45

How strange, I used the defaults also. I would be surprised if it was the new sector size but it does seem to look that way....

Methanoid · 3 Dec 2010 at 15:25

I think it might be cos the OS has decided it will take 15 hours to build an empty array!?

Methanoid · 5 Dec 2010 at 10:57

Array initialised and speeds greatly improved.

Read 330MB/s and Write 44MB/s - Raid5 write speeds do suck...

gamesaregood · 5 Dec 2010 at 11:00

Methanoid said:
Array initialised and speeds greatly improved.

Read 330MB/s and Write 44MB/s - Raid5 write speeds do suck...

Ah great

Yes... I found that with write speeds...

Methanoid · 7 Dec 2010 at 21:02

Aha. Picked up a hardware Raid card.. when I have moved all my data (will take a lifetime) and rebuilt new array I'll let you know. Reviews show R and W speeds at 500MB/s. We shall see if that happens!

Methanoid · 8 Jan 2011 at 21:21

H/W card did me a stunning 314Mb/s read (good but not great) but a STONKING 492Mb/s write. Yes, hardware raid and with 8x2Tb drives... but the system is unable to Sleep. So it might have to go...

Might try your S/W raid (either an AMD 880G system or another Intel one)