rediculously bad drive speeds with onboard raid

[dudzcom]

ok, so i got a new machine. yay.

bummer is that the machine's 2 sata western digital re 400gb hds (wd4000yr) are raided together in RAID1, and are performing worth crap... together, they are performing at about half the speed as one should standing alone.

motherboard: asus a8n-sli premium, with a silicon image 3114r raid controller (sata)
setup: both drives are plugged into the 3114r controller in raid1.
problem: write speed = 50mb/s, read speed = 40mb/s !! wtf?

so far:
updated drivers like mad, however it seems ive got the newest drivers for everything.
flashed bios with the newest version (no help).


suggestions! please! i will give you $5 if u help me solve this... big money if ur from somalia

thanks in advance
-will

 

[jap0nes]

i wont help you just because you said the somalia thing. assh0le

 

[dudzcom]

wow, no sense of humor... i could have replaced somalia with <insert your african/south american/asian country here>

... somalia was the only one i was sure i could spell though

 

[jap0nes]

no, you could have simply not written that line.
actually, you're the poor person here. Poor minded for thinking that way

 

[dudzcom]

sure, whatever.

im just looking for someone smart enough to tell me how to fix my raid problem. im not looking for a flame war.

 

[TeraMedia]

I have a similar problem - slow RAID - but with a different config. I have 4 x 400 GB drives (same SATA WD 400 YR drives as you) configured in a matrixed RAID 0 (~125 GB) and RAID 5 (1 TB) array. The RAID 0 drives work fast enough - I can record two or three channels of TV and do other things just fine - but the RAID 5 array is slow as a dog. I would estimate the write speed at something like 1-2 MB per second - so slow that trying to record a single (NTSC) TV channel in MCE didn't work. Drive controller is the ICH7R on the Intel D955XBK board. I haven't touched the RAID drivers or BIOS since I set everything up in January.

<b>dudzcom, </b> Could your problem possibly be caused by a lack of write-back cache for the RAID 1 array? I suspect I may have that kind of problem with my RAID 5 array, but don't know how to fix it.

 

[TeraMedia]

Forgot to note: read speed from the RAID 5 array seems to be ok. Not stellar, but acceptable.

 

[dudzcom]

hey teramedia,

as to the raid5, i'd guess that has to do with the outsourcing of xor operations to the cpu with most low end (<$500) raid cards.

raid5 requres LOTS of xors... and usually it makes ur main cpu handle them... if the cpu is busy with other shit, it will lag ur drives bad.

unfortunately, thats not my problem. my problem (which i should have probably mentioned in the original post) is that the write speeds are acceptable (~50mb/s or so), but the read speeds are even lower!!!!! (~40mb/s)!!!!!

i dont even know how thats possible.

 

[juvealert]

the problem might be that ur sata interface is 150mb/s WD4000YR which have lower read/write speeds than a SATA 300mb/s interface

 

[allred]

ok, so i got a new machine. yay.

bummer is that the machine's 2 sata western digital re 400gb hds (wd4000yr) are raided together in RAID1

There's the problem, it's raid1. It's designed for data security, not speed.

 

[lcdguy]

Raid 1 - same performance as the drives on there own

you want either Raid 0 - Performance, no data integrity or Raid 5 - a little bit of both worlds.

 

[dudzcom]

yea i know what raid 1 is and what it does... ive set up several machines with raid 1 with no problem.

effects of raid1 (in general)
write speed goes down by about 30%
read speed goes up by about 70% as compared to a stand-alone drive.

in my case, write speed has gone down by about 20% (normal), read speed has gone DOWN by about 40%!!!

hence the problem.

 

[p05esto]

Ignore the bumbass and his offense to the somila comment. Making fun of poor countries IS funny. These countries all shoot each other, spread aids like chain letters and have 50 kids even though they can't afford to feed themselves. Their trouble is totally self-inflicted and I have little pitty.

Anyway, RAID one should be FASTER for read access (proven to be true) but maybe a tad slower for writing (although I think it's not noticable). I use RAID 1 and experience no problems.

You may have one failing drive in the array which is slowing the whole thing down. If possible save your data elsewhere and try each drive alone. If fine, reformat each and reset up the array. If not, you've found the problem.

 

[MrCommunistGen]

the problem might be that ur sata interface is 150mb/s WD4000YR which have lower read/write speeds than a SATA 300mb/s interface

no.

I'm a bit confused about this myself. Though I haven't worked with a RAID 1, I thought that reads should basically stay the same as a single drives with the writes taking a performance hit.

Edit- Oh... I see you've already addressed this since I originally clicked on the link about half an hour ago and only now got to reply to it. I haven't checked the drives specs, but if it has NCQ you might try toggleing it to the opposite setting. There could possibly be something wrong with the RAID controller. Other than that I don't really have any ideas.

Edit 2 - I see that the drives do have NCQ.

-mcg

 

[utaka95]

Yeah I think you ticked off that dude because he is too poor to buy a new rig, look at his sig....

 

[MrCommunistGen]

Yeah I think you ticked off that dude because he is too poor to buy a new rig, look at his sig....

I'd say that that's below the belt.
Having an up to date computer shouldn't be the most important thing in the world although it seems like it is to quite a few people here.
-mcg

 

[utaka95]

You're right, that was below the belt. While I'm not a new rig kinda guy either, his stuff is just plain antique. Maybe that's his game though.

 

[michaelahess]

Check your sector size, if it's really small or really large it will kill performance.

Also, I have a highpoint rocketraid 2320 that does xor onboard, though it has no cache memory. It only ups cpu usage by a couple of percent and my RAID5 over 4 320's runs just over 126 on reads (sequential) and 46 on writes. Bursts to 196 on reads. It was around $240

The writes are slow because I have write through instead of write back enabled which slows things down but is safer if a power outage occurs. Lot's of integrated raid controllers only do write back so this may not be an option that you can check.

 

[jap0nes]

Ignore the bumbass and his offense to the somila comment. Making fun of poor countries IS funny. These countries all shoot each other, spread aids like chain letters and have 50 kids even though they can't afford to feed themselves. Their trouble is totally self-inflicted and I have little pitty.

ahahahahaahah look at yourself man. Iraq invasion was what? a game? probably, for retarded like you, some soldiers must have felt like in BF2 while destroing someone else's life. AIDS? aids was brought to humans due to some sick white man, probably from some rich coutry (yours, who knows?) who enjoyed having sex with MONKEYS. While they cant feed themselves you spend your money eating junk food and you'll end up like on super size me.

yeah, you're so ignorant that you'd better live your life inside your little perfect world

 

[michaelahess]

hehe, right on, spoilled brats in civilized countries these days, don't know what life would be like without clean water and a corrupt government that tries to destroy you for their own profit. Course I don't either but at least I'll sympathize

Oh and I still have a 486 running and it does its job admerably so back off the old hardware guys.

 

[4745454b]

What the F is wrong with people on this forum? Yesterday people are making fun of someone cause he doesn't have the $$$ to buy a fast video card, now we get to insult people from other countries? Its bullys that put people down to make themselves feel better. I hope you go get the therapy you obviously need. (an education might help to, where in the hell is a white guy going to find a monkey to have sex with in the states? A dog sure, thats easy, but a monkey???)

As for the problem the OP has, I'm not familier with that RAID controller. I do know that not all RAID controllers support reading from both drives. Most do, and I would think SI 3114 would, but maybe not. Have you gone over the RAID bios settings? Double check your cables?

 

[dudzcom]

THANKS TO ALL YOU GUYS WHO ACTUALLY POSTED ON-TOPIC.

i dont know what the hell happened to this thread, but i thought i'd post a follow-up.

i've come to some conclusions about the problem.
i did some crazy tests, (in turn erasing all the data on the drives), but i know whats goin on now.

Raid 1 - same performance as the drives on there own

A very naieve answer, however 100% exactly whats going on. the drives in raid 1 when attached to the nvidia raid have the performance specs of a single drive +- 5% depending on how/when its being tested.

the problem really arose when i believed that all raid controlers had the common sense to read large files (>~16k) from both drives at once (as all previous raid controlers that i've bought do). apparantly these el-chepo mobo controllers dont. i am now fairly satisfied that theres nothing "wrong", however i will be looking for a more "intelligent" raid 1 solution for this computer in the near future.

thank you to everyone whos posted. you've all been a great help.

-will

 

[jap0nes]

where in the hell is a white guy going to find a monkey to have sex with in the states? A dog sure, thats easy, but a monkey???

well, one of the theories about aids' origin was that people got infected from monkeys by having sex with them, but your "civilized" school probably said that it's just some third world disease which plagues you good boys.

What the F is wrong with people on this forum? Yesterday people are making fun of someone cause he doesn't have the $$$ to buy a fast video card, now we get to insult people from other countries? Its bullys that put people down to make themselves feel better. I hope you go get the therapy you obviously need

you were saying that to dudzcom and p05esto, right?

i dont know what the hell happened to this thread, but i thought i'd post a follow-up.

nice discriminatory first post of yours. thumbs up for you. just keep the "good job".

 

[ethel]

RAID 1 even on SCSI with a decent RAID card is quick to read, but slower to write in my experience, as it has to write to 2 disks, but read from only one.

And this could also be the problem here - because you're using mirroring, naturally it has to write to 2 disks at once, so it is never going to be faster than one disk, and will probably be slower as you are using an onboard SATA controller.

But read performance SHOULD be the same as one disk, as it only has to read one of the disks, not both. If it is infact reading from both, then that's ridiculously poor

 

[4745454b]

"you were saying that to dudzcom and p05esto, right?"

How about I aimed that at whoever is name calling and not helping. So whoever might have said things like "i wont help you just because you said the somalia thing. assh0le" might want to consider adding themselves to the list...