Raid Performance Check

Herr_Ando

Herr_Ando

Herr_Ando

Associate
Joined
20 Jul 2005
Posts
37
Hi guys I think I'm having some problems with my new Asrock 890FX Deluxe4 motherboard.

I know my hard disks aren't sata 3, but I was expecting better rates than what I'm getting.

I'm using all the latest drivers provided by asrock for each controller in these tests.

Please see this screen shot of a bencmark of hd tunepro on this:

3 X SAMSUNG HD103UJ (F1 1tb 7200rpm 32mb cache) in Raid 5. using 1 of the 6 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by AMD SB850

26-March-2011_23-10.png



I understand that using raid 5 the controller must calculate the partity on disk writes and this would reduce performance, but this test is purely on the read fuction.

2 X Seagate ST3500418AS (Baracuda 500GB 7200rpm 16MB cache) in raid 0. using 1 of the 6 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by AMD SB850


This looks a bit better, but can anyone explain the huge dip? Looks ok but still not great.

26-March-2011_23-06.png



1x Single Western Digital WD2500KS (Caviar 250GB 7200RPM 16MB cache) using the seperate 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by Marvell SE9120.

This was the weirdest benchmark of all, this was on the marvell se9120 - the test looks way too steady. I also tried a WD3200AAJS on this controller and recieved a very similar set of results. For a SATA 3 controller this doesnt seem to be able to get above 60MB/s!

26-March-2011_23-15.png



Anyone have any thoughts as to what could be going on here?
 
Are the drives empty?

Also, Marvell SATA controllers are known to suck so avoid using them unless you have to. Using them for things like optical drives is a good idea so you can use Intel/AMD ports for your HDDs and SSDs.
 
RAID 5 is cpu dependent, since your not using a hardware card. My 5 1TB F1's in RAID 5 on my onboard score the same as when I had 4 in the array, and only similar to when I had 2 in RAID 0

my 5 F4's in RAID 5 on an add in card (still not proper hardware though) score stupidly higher (4k @ 150mbps instead of 35mbps like the F1's and @ 8mb its like 5-600 instead of 300 ish).

On a Sil 2 port add in card, 2 f1's in RAID 0 got awesome write speed, but no more read speed than a single one, and on the on board they performed much better. Even though all the calcs are done by the same cpu etc.

Id say its the controller in your case, onboard controllers are poor at RAID 5, good for raid 1 and 0 but aything else isnt what they are optimized for.


Edit: for the small 250gb drive, the fact its on a sata 6gbps port wont do anything to increase its physical read speed, hard drives have only recently(ish) started to perform better than ATA133, and more recently some drives are over the sata 1.5gbps interface, no where near the 3gbps of sata II andas such sata III is pointless for mechanical drives. SSD's are what are driving this forward at the moment.
 
Last edited:
Herr_Ando said:
3 X SAMSUNG HD103UJ (F1 1tb 7200rpm 32mb cache) in Raid 5. using 1 of the 6 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by AMD SB850

26-March-2011_23-10.png
Click to expand...
Doubled the speed of a single one, doesn't sound too bad?

Herr_Ando said:
2 X Seagate ST3500418AS (Baracuda 500GB 7200rpm 16MB cache) in raid 0. using 1 of the 6 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by AMD SB850


This looks a bit better, but can anyone explain the huge dip? Looks ok but still not great.

26-March-2011_23-06.png
Click to expand...
Did anything else read from the drive at this time? Or perhaps the system was busy with another task, priorities!

Herr_Ando said:
1x Single Western Digital WD2500KS (Caviar 250GB 7200RPM 16MB cache) using the seperate 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by Marvell SE9120.

This was the weirdest benchmark of all, this was on the marvell se9120 - the test looks way too steady. I also tried a WD3200AAJS on this controller and recieved a very similar set of results. For a SATA 3 controller this doesnt seem to be able to get above 60MB/s!

26-March-2011_23-15.png



Anyone have any thoughts as to what could be going on here?
Click to expand...
If you stick a slow old car on a race track it doesn't go faster ;) That's a very old hard drive and if you look on review sites for benchmarks you'll see that 60MB/s is the kinda speed to expect from it :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom