View Full Version : SATA/RAID 5 performance
nugzo
05-01-2007, 03:46 PM
I've been told the nforce boards suck as far as SATA and Raid performance goes. I just ran Everest Disk benchmark and i need some of XS to run this benchmark please on different chipsests as well as with the Areca and other RAID Cards for comparison. I want to know just how much i'm losin here. With Everest 4 hit tools then Disk benchmark. I selected Read test suite. I ran this on my WD Raptor and my RAID 5 array (4xMaxtor SATA 2 500gb) on an EVGA 680i board with the 570MCP. Here is the benchmark. Thanks.
http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/8098/680isatanq7.jpg
nugzo
05-02-2007, 11:01 AM
Bump.
Rambunctious
05-03-2007, 07:15 AM
Good comparison, I'll have to post my RAID 5 setup tonight (remind me, can I Everest under Vista?). I had my MB set up with 3 HD in a RAID 0/5 configuration. I was loving the performance of the RAID 0 with the OS and most applications on this partition. Then one of my HDs decided to throw a bad sector at me on my RAID 5 partition so when I replaced the drive, I lost the RAID 0 partition of course :(
I love the fact that my data was available (I backed up the degraded RAID 5 array to a standalone drive) so I rebuilt it with a single RAID 5 partition last night. However, I have been very disappointed with the performance. I expected longer write times, but it has been borderline agonizing. So now I'm a bit confused on how to improve performance. I would have jumped on a Raptor if I had found a good price on one this morning or do I roll the dice again with a split RAID 0/5 configuration?
Question for BadAxe2 owners ... when I replaced my drive, I blew away both partitions and created a new one. Now in the Intel RAID setup screen (the one that comes up after the BIOS), it shows a status of "Initializing" instead of "Ready". Should I be concerned?
rommel
05-03-2007, 08:22 AM
Initializing indicates that it's still building your raid array. Give it a day to finish up. I've got 4 250gb's on raid5, it took about a day before it went to a normal state. I also had one of my drives die on me, it took about 13 hours to recover with a new drive. You can still use your pc but it will be very slow. I ended up not touching mine until if was back to a normal state.
Good luck. :)
I do software RAID0 and 5 (not SATA onboard RAID) over the NVidia SATA ports, and they certainly are fast.
Now, I have been told that parts of NVidia's raid software (for the onboard stuff) stinks, in particular raid-1 which apparently doesn't give you any speedup.
I don't do Windoze, though, so I can't run your benchmarks.
Rambunctious
05-03-2007, 11:11 AM
You know what I was thinking ... instead of adding either breaking up the RAID 5 into a RAID 0/5 or a Raptor as a drive-OS, I could add another drive and just go with a RAID 10 and get both of both worlds. The WD in my system aren't that expensive, about half the price of a Raptor, right?)
Can my board do RAID 10? I think so ... can I add a drive and convert it using the Intel Manager? (or do I have to blow the partition away, start over, and reload the OS?)
BenchZowner
05-04-2007, 04:36 AM
You need to test your write rates with RAID 5 and these on-board controllers, the read rates are ok, but you have to check your write rates before saying I'm ok ;)
Grinch
05-04-2007, 06:41 AM
have you done this in your device manager?
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2010613&postcount=66
should increase speed
Rambunctious
05-04-2007, 09:40 AM
have you done this in your device manager?
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showpost.php?p=2010613&postcount=66
should increase speed
Good suggestion but (1) I'm on Intel-based board (looks like that's for nvidia), (2) I'm using Vista, and (3) I'm at work and can't see what's available to try out ;) I left the system on at home and hopefully it should finish initializing the RAID session (it was at ~25% and ~8 hours remain). We'll see if that adds any overhead.
I neeeearly blew it last night. Updated my system BIOS to 2692 (sp?) and it failed to POST on boot. Took me an hour+ to figure out I should go into maintenance mode and reset everything (such as voltage to RAM) as it had been reset. Whew! I thought I was toast!
Rambunctious
05-05-2007, 08:38 AM
I've been told the nforce boards suck as far as SATA and Raid performance goes. I just ran Everest Disk benchmark and i need some of XS to run this benchmark please on different chipsests as well as with the Areca and other RAID Cards for comparison. I want to know just how much i'm losin here. With Everest 4 hit tools then Disk benchmark. I selected Read test suite. I ran this on my WD Raptor and my RAID 5 array (4xMaxtor SATA 2 500gb) on an EVGA 680i board with the 570MCP. Here is the benchmark. Thanks.
http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/8098/680isatanq7.jpg
Ok ... surprised at these results shown below on my Intel XBX2 board. Your numbers are better than mine on a supposedly sucky RAID board. I only have a 3 drive array (250 WD SATA II) does that make a difference? Also, my RAID is on the ICH7 ports, not the Marvell ones.
3 tests, first 2 on the RAID, 2nd test with the write cache enabled. Note that I'm turning my write cache OFF as I'm more concerned about data integrity. I bet this is amazing on a RAID 0 setup.
"For performance benchmarks, some of the new drives have write-back caching by default. This means the drive reports a write is completed before it is actually on the media. The block is still in the drive's cache, where the writes can be reordered. If this happens, metadata changes might be written before the log commit blocks, leading to corruption if the machine loses power. It is very important to disable write-back caching on both IDE and SCSI drives. " http://sr5tech.com/write_back_cache_experiments.htm