M2N32-SLI sluggish Raid 5 problem - suggestions appreciated

[hdtvguy]

I just built a new storage/home theater rig. specs as follows:

Asus M2N32-SLI deluxe
AMD 3800+ X2
1 Gig Geil pc2-800 ddr2
eVga geforce 6600 GT 128mb (from old SLI setup, just single card now, waiting for directx 10 stuff before upping this)
Thermaltake toughpower 700 power supply
6xseagate 320GB 7200.10 drives in Raid 5 1.45TB volume
LG DVD burner
Custom enclosure to fit my AV rack

So I get this puppy up and running and everything is good. fast boot, lots storage, etc. But i notice that it takes forever to do the following:

1. transfers over my gigabit lan, which moves a large hdtv file between my other two computers in about 15 minutes, takes about 4x as long.
2. disk to disk copies - i.e from the raid to the raid to make two copies of a file, so one can be safely edited - take forver.
3. joining .TS (mpeg 2 transport stream) files takes 4x as long as on an athlon 64 3500+ - albeit with 2GB of ram. Also, the cores barely register anything during this so it appears to be more HD limited.

I have no boot issues, no BSOD's, no fluctuations. only software installed is windos xp home, VLC, diskeeper, AVG antivirus, and firewall. I have done an initial defrag run thattook several days - also seemed very sluggish but I thought maybe diskeeper just needed to anylyze everything close first time through - subsequent runs have remained slow. I made sure to disable AVG scans and diskeeper scans when doing disk intensive ops but there is still a huge lag compared to older system.

Temps are all low in the mid to high 30's and with prime 95 two instances the cores stabilize at 51 deg C, so overheating is not an issue. The disk array has two 12cm flans pulling and pushing air over them and they are cool to the touch (yes I ground myself first).

I thought 6 new HD's in raid 5 should give me decent speed, but it appears it is etremely sluggish. anyone have any ideas that i should start to check?

Thanks!

 

[mkaibear]

You're going to be memory limited, especially with the size of files you're moving / working on - so it's going to be swapping ridiculously.

Stick 2Gb in there, that should speed things up no end.

I also suspect you're having network issues - check you've got the GB LAN drivers installed and working, make sure you're using the same performance settings as elsewhere (specifically MTU, etc).

 

[hdtvguy]

Should I bump straight to 3GB? I know 4GB causes severe problems with 32-bit XP, but will 3GB give me just that much more room without causing any memory conflict issues?

I re-read my post and though maybe memory was the issue. I'll re-install the latest forceware stuff too and then manually check GB settings.

Thanks for the heads up.

 

[mike99]

Check out the raid controller. If the CPU is doing the work, Raid 5 has a lot of overheads when processig the Write, if your main CPU is doing it, that's your problem. Better RAID cards have a large (64Mb or more) onboard cache, and their own CPU.
Mike.

 

[hdtvguy]

it is the onboard raid with the nvidia 590SLI chipset, no discrete memory I am aware of.
thanks for the tip tho.

 

[zyky]

unless you have a high end dedicated raid controller, most raid-5 solutions (onboard /etc) are worthless, and with 6 seagate 320s, you'll be lucky to pull 25MB write performance (though will probably easily top 200mb/s read)

 

[hdtvguy]

so it is likely an inherent weakness of the controller. Sux.

so if i pick up an adaptec controller or similar, can i swap my cables over and have the new card detect the array as is or am i gonna have to back up and reformat? (my guess would be i will have to back up and reformat but will admit i've never swapped a six disk array from one controller to another........)

thanks for the info zyky