Inq says Conroe and RAID 5 have problems

[Tranzmit]

Seems there cpu utilization issues with RAID 5

http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32818

[Haltech]

Idiots.. the southbridge doesnt control the raid. They have a controller chip and a bios for a reason. No big deal, it will be sorted out.. I see they didnt try any other Intel chipped board such as Asus, DFI, Gigabyte, ABit, etc.

[djoekie]

Idiots.. the southbridge doesnt control the raid. They have a controller chip and a bios for a reason. No big deal, it will be sorted out.. I see they didnt try any other Intel chipped board such as Asus, DFI, Gigabyte, ABit, etc.
Actually i think they mean that the Intel ICH7R Raid-5 implementation is acting up with the Conroe. However they don't mention a test with a Pentium D or 4 on the same bord. What's the use of comparing it with AMD platform!?!?!?!

Don't pay attention, it's crap....

[VulgarHandle]

well, it seems the government didn't ignore the problem...
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32842

[FunkyRider]

I don't care as I don't use RAID5 :banana:

[DrJohn]

The reason was that there were severe problems when Woodcrest was paired with a 1E RAID field when using IBM ServeRAID controllers.

Sounds like a problem with an external IBM raid controller Duh.

[derektm]

Can anyone else confirm RAID 5 problems with a non Intel Conroe MB?

[ted3]

Hmm, doesnt sound too good, Intel quality isnt what it used to be.

I havent tried RAID5 on any desktop board yet, the write performance is too poor to even consider it. But i did have a problem with ICH7R when i tested Matrix Raid on 2 disks, the Raid1 would start rebuilding for no good reason. The CPU that time was a 630. Raid0 however i have used on all 4 ICH7R boards i had and never any problem.

[Brahmzy]

This sucks, I bought 2 brand new 74GB 16mb cache Raptors to RAID0 in my Conroe build. Will the P5B Deluxe have these issues?

[lawrywild]

raid 0?? topic's about raid 5.. :stick:

[uOpt]

I just posted this in the other thread about it:

This is nothing else than a little BIOS problem initializing a PCI-X or PCIe hardware RAID controller made by IBM.

Nothing to be seen here.

How IN THE WORLD would a CPU architecture not be able to "run RAID". Yessus, how stupid can people get?

[lawrywild]

I just posted this in the other thread about it:

This is nothing else than a little BIOS problem initializing a PCI-X or PCIe hardware RAID controller made by IBM.

Nothing to be seen here.

How IN THE WORLD would a CPU architecture not be able to "run RAID". Yessus, how stupid can people get?

yeh, cpus have nothing to do with controlling RAID, inq making up bs methinks.. :slap:

[kurg]

It's not strictly true that the CPU has nothing to do with RAID 5. It has little to do with a RAID 5 controller, of course, but onboard RAID5 is CPU driven.

That said, I think this is all a bunch of crap. First, we have 2 separate claims. One says it's onboard issue, the other says it's IBM controller (which, as you've all said, has little to do with the CPU).

Second, even if there is a problem with onboard RAID5 it's probably a BIOS or controller issue, and who gives a rat's ass - using onboard RAID5 is generally a..."poorly considered" idea anyway. Either use the OS's RAID5 or buy a controller card.

[audiofreak]

Southbridge does contain SATA/IDE controller hence RAID is controlled by Southbridge (ICH7R, ICH8R).

About RAID5 -- it may have to do with threading and shared L2 cache. Anyway, it can probably be fixed by driver update unless it is the issue southbridge .vs. cache coherency or something.

About IBM ServeRAID -- it most likely is completely different issue.

[BenT]

Raid 5 is worthless unless you're in a heavy server environment, and if that's your thing, you're going to have a nice raid card anyway. For home use, raid 0, 1, or 0+1 is all you're ever going to need.

[lawrywild]

anyway,

this is woodcrest not conroe...

diff mobos.. diff bioses..

[uOpt]

A little BIOS problem, that's it, even for the onboard RAID. Whoever uses that for a redundant array is insane anyway.

RAID-5 doesn't do anything magic, just a good load of XORs, that's all.

I bet 45 cookies even the same board will do fine in Linux software RAID-5.

[audiofreak]

There have been reports on Creative's forum about software RAID5 and X-Fi sound cards not liking each other even on AMD machines. Software RAID5 uses too much CPU.

[uOpt]

Creative has problems if a sack of rice falls over in Tibet. What's new.

Are we talking about RAID-5 on the SATA_SIL or the Intel SATA here?

[Ace-a-Rue]

quote about raid 5:



Special Considerations: Due to the amount of parity calculating required, software RAID 5 can seriously slow down a system. Performance will depend to some extent upon the stripe size chosen.

Recommended Uses: RAID 5 is seen by many as the ideal combination of good performance, good fault tolerance and high capacity and storage efficiency. It is best suited for transaction processing and is often used for "general purpose" service, as well as for relational database applications, enterprise resource planning and other business systems. For write-intensive applications, RAID 1 or RAID 1+0 are probably better choices (albeit higher in terms of hardware cost), as the performance of RAID 5 will begin to substantially decrease in a write-heavy environment.


http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel5-c.html

[uOpt]

That advise is outdated.

Modern CPUs gained so much speed in comparision to the relatively minor speed gains of disks that you can pretty much not bring a modern CPU to its knees with a single raid-5 array made from SATA drives no matter how much you write. Most people who give the above advise formed it with 7200 rpm SCSI disks using a 200 MHz Pentium-Pro or at most a 450 MHz P-III generation Xeon. A 2.6 GHz AMD64 with a bunch of modern 7200 rpm disks spend most of its time idle.

Of course there is some additional CPU usage compared to RAID-1/10 but it is about the same order of magnitude that a modern filesystem needs for block allocation. If you have a dual-core Conroe or overclocked Opteron 939 CPU usage is not an issue.

CPU usage numbers for various RAIDs here:
http://forum.useless-microoptimizations.com/forum/raid.html

Of course you need smart RAID software which to my knowledge is not to be found with that onboard SATA raid junk.

[nFo]

Who needs Raid 5 if you have Raid 0 ? :banana:

[theteamaqua]

couldnt care less ... RAID0 is mroe than enough