Windows 2003 Software RAID 5 performance

[Motter]

Hello

I got a small server with Windows Server 2003 Standard and have been playing with the though of making a software raid 5 with 4x300GB disks.

But which Write speeds can one expect to get ?

My system:
Pentium M 2 Ghz, 1 GB DDR2 ram
1x200gb system disk (onboard controller)
and got 4x300GB seagate pata disks on a promise ata133 controller.


Cheers
Motter

 

[sandmanwn]

I wouldnt expect too much. Perhaps 100-150mb/s. The writes are particularly difficult without a hardware based controller. And it will be a resource hog on the CPU especially with an older single core processor.

Something like Raid0+1 would be easier on your system although it wont give you the same capacity as a Raid5

 

[Motter]

I would go with a hardware solution if i could get one here in denmark.

There are only a highpoint card with "fake" raid 5 and 2 3ware cards which got 12 and 16 channel and thats like overkill especially to the price.

150mb/sec == 150MB/sec or 15MB/sec ?

 

[sandmanwn]

It would be closer to 100MB/sec now that I see that they are PATA drives. I missed that before.

 

[Motter]

Anything i should remember when i convert the disks to dynamic and start building the raid ?

 

[sandmanwn]

Stripe size can be important. It depends on how this server is being used. Will there be lots of smaller files, a mix of sizes, or lots of large files?

 

[Motter]

Basicly files from 5MB and up

 

[sandmanwn]

depends on what the "and up" part means. If its just a bunch of 5-100+mb files then a 32 stripe should be fine.

if you are talking about GB+ file sizes then a 64 or 128 stripe would suite you better.

Other than that it should be really straight forward.
Setup the raid on the controller.
Grab a floppy and save the driver to it.
Load driver during startup and away you go.

Since this is software based, make sure you get some sort of status software for your controller since it most likely wont have LED indicators on the hard drives themselves.

 

[Motter]

Are there other ways of making software raid than using the build in disk manager in Windows ?

Got a sugestion for a status tool, i'm using a std ata controller without raid at all.

 

[sandmanwn]

ah, this is software...software... raid. In that case I would stick with the disk manager, it will work just fine.

 

[Motter]

Thank you for the answers, ill try to build a raid 5 and return with some bench results.

 

[sandmanwn]

Heres a step by step of the software raid 5 setup on a Win 2003 machine, just in case. 8)
http://www.netadmintools.com/art439.html

 

[Motter]

Hmmm write speed are very bad, im only getting like 5MB/sec, taken from total commanders estimate, read speeds is about 50MB/sec and thats fine since its only a 100mbit network the server is on.

Any sugestions on what could be wrong here?

 

[SomeJoe7777]

5MB/sec is typical for software RAID 5.

Unfortunately, sandman's estimate was way off. He may have been thinking you were going to be using a hardware RAID solution.

RAID 5 requires a hardware solution for decent performance.

 

[sandmanwn]

yeah I made that statement before I figured out the OP was talking about Windows software raid and not firmware. You dont have to have a full hardware solution to get decent raid 5 performance, If you want great Raid5 performance then yes hardware is necessary.

Picking up even a cheap-o firmware based raid controller should get you that 100MB/sec

Checking out benchmarks on the pure Software raid is showing up at 5mb/s. Which is horrific and there is obviously something wrong with the way the OS is utilizing resources for the Raid5 setup. There is no reason for the performance to be that low. Similar Linux software setups can easily exceed 100MB/sec.

 

[dragonsprayer]

The sandman had no clue what he talking about raid 5 is much much slower then 100-150 mb

you get 80-100mb with 4 hdd - raid 5 is about 30-50mb if you use build in raid 5 in mobos you prbably crash eventually.

lol sandman your such a noob -- i ran disksppeed 32 on 2 systems with 4 drives each systems a was 4 raptors 100mb max

systems b was 4 drive 7200 sata - raid 10/0 each ran 80mb average.

your sniffing too much vx! lol 150mb raid 5 lol

 

[sandmanwn]

ok pentium 4 boy. go overclock some more and burn down your house already. Oh please tell us how an old netburst P4 is half a Core 2 Duo again, please Im dying to hear that one again.

Im pretty sure my Raid 5 experience far exceeds yours. I have over 300 servers in my Co-Lo that Ive setup over the past years, some of which are 8 or more years old, still running perfectly fine.

I can provide many raid5 benchmarks with 4 disks that far exceed 80-100mb/s even on machines that are running 8 year old scsi 160's

 

[dragonsprayer]

lol

you took that out of context - the guy wanted a comparison

a 2.4c is about a half a 1.8 core 2 duo e6300 in over all performance - its ok - i really do have the time to document it but when i do you will look pretty dumb on all the those posts!

 

[sandmanwn]

You can quote all you want but it only takes a few minutes to look around and see all the flak your getting for your outrageously stupid posts.

Pfff, half a E6300, you mean half way down the performance benchmark list right? :lol:

i ran disksppeed 32 on 2 systems with 4 drives each systems a was 4 raptors 100mb max

Who's the noob here? 4 raptors on a PCI controller cannot exceed 100mb/s because of the PCI bus. It has absolutely nothing to do with the drives or the Raid5 setup whatsoever.

Talk about Noob. :roll:

 

[Motter]

So 5MB/sec is okay for a real software raid 5 solution or what ?

File transfers to the raid is okay at start, 50MB/sec but half way speeds drops to 1-5MB/sec.

 

[jt001]

Off topic but I couldn't help myself

a 2.4c is about a half a 1.8 core 2 duo e6300 in over all performance - its ok - i really do have the time to document it but when i do you will look pretty dumb on all the those posts!

Are you insane?? Seriously, so let's make a more sensible comparison here, rather than half a Core 2 Duo and a single core p4, we'll take a dual core 2.6GHz PD and the E6300, basically the same thing you said, now which one is gonna win? Yeah the Core 2 is gonna walk all over the Pentium D

Back on topic, software RAID 5 sucks period, at least get a controller even if it doesn't have XOR offloading, it will still smoke that software RAID all around.

 

[Motter]

Which card would you sugest ?

The only card here in denmark is HighPoint RocketRAID 454, the 3ware cards are real server cards.

 

[sandmanwn]

yeah, that should suit your needs.

 

[Madwand]

There'd be limits as to how fast you can get with this machine doing software-based RAID 5 over PCI. The HighPoint is software-based.

As suggested earlier, the OP should consider RAID 10 or even simple RAID 1 arrays. It wouldn't cost anything but some space, and should give much better write performance than he's seeing so far, and probably even better than he'd get with the old Highpoint PCI RAID controller in RAID 5.

The customer reviews on NewEgg for that card aren't great, and NewEgg customers (who have already voted with their dollars) aren't the most challenging reviewers.

E.g. one of them reports 8 MB/s RAID 5 writes with the card with high CPU utilization.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/CustRatingReview.asp?DEPA=0&Type=&Item=N82E16816115016&SortField=0&SummaryType=ALL&Pagesize=&Page=2

The fact that these drives are PATA, while not inherently a performance issue, is a practical issue for finding decent affordable RAID solutions. I'd look on eBay hoping for an old higher-end controller that someone's dumping, or just go with a RAID 1 type solution.

 

[Motter]

The only cards on ebay are the sx4060 and the highpoint ones with the non existing XOR cpu.

Its just that RAID 10 is 50% storage loss vs N-1 on RAID 5.

I'm only wanting like a 200Mbit performance nothing more or less.