Adaptec 5805 Read Write Speeds

curveball323

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Jan 15, 2013
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I recently have purchased a Adaptec 5805 w/BBU 512MB Cache and a dual core ROC On board processor on to a 8x pcie 2.0 slot on the Gigabyte 990fx-UD7 motherboard with 6x (2TB) seagate 7200RPM configured in a RAID level 5. i got 32GB 1866 mhz gskill sniper ram a fx 8350 8core AMD processor OC to 4.5 Ghz with water cooling 100Hi corsair and a 500Gb seagate for the OS running Windows 7. yeah yeah we all know the specs. anyways I installed it updated the firmware to the very latest pulled the latest driver from adaptec as well istalled the BBU configured the 6 drives set them up in a raid 5 (as mentioned above) and let it do its parity checks to optimize the RAID. everything boots up nicely loads correctly it shows my 9.8 TB of storage on the RAID 5 as OPTIMAL. I got two 120mm fans blowing right on the card to keep it cool and all the cache settings to enabled and the write cache to write back mode with the BBU. I have performed checks with crystaldisk and get results around 700MB/S READ and WRITE Sequentially ofcoarse.

HERE IS THE QUESTION and SUPPOSED PROBLEM:

As I transfer files from my RAID 5 to my other SATA connected HDD on my computer files ranging from 2GB to 14GB. it starts off really fast at about 96MB/s with Teracopy. all the write cache enabled for the other HDD on my system as well in windows so not only the RAID 5 with write back cache but also the drive that has the OS and USB connected drives I have put Write cache enabled on them. It starts off super high and then at about the 1GB transfer mark it slows all the way back to 30MB/s file transfer speed and continues 30MB/s through the transfer never speeding back up. it depends on what file is transfered though some it stays at 96 through the whole transfer those usually being small files like the 2GB or lower ones but anything over 2GB it always slows back down to 30 or 40 MB/s. I have heard that the Adaptec 5805 are Way fast at above 110 MB/s file transfer speed but have yet to see this speed. do you think that the write cache is filling up and therefore it slows back down? do you think it is a bottleneck in the write speeds of the drives i'm writing files to the NON RAID 5 HDD?? do you think i should be getting 100 MB/s and above on file transfers? or is that only with SAS 15000rpm drives? or do you think I need a SDD for maxiq to be able to reach those speeds? I have been doing lots and lots of research trying to figure this out but have found nothing. any of you IT pros that know Adaptec cards let me know what the problem is or if there even is a problem with going from fast to slow file transfer speeds. love you guys thanks for everything
 

curveball323

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Jan 15, 2013
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Ok PEOPLE! I have been looking and looking and looking and searching probably for over a month now about how to connect configure and setup the Adaptec 5805 Series Raid Controller. I have done so much research to what motherboard it can go to what pcie lane to install it on and the settings to making it faster controlling power and everything. I have FOUND THE BEST SETTINGS FOR IT!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok so last night I was testing settings on and off on and off and testing real file transfer speeds copying 14GB files down to 2 GB files. The testing went amazing and I found what needs to be set in windows and on the Controller for MAXIMUM Performance with a BBU and not MAXIQ. I'm sure the MAXIQ with a SDD cache would be better or even the Capacitor backup instead of the Battery Backup but I don't have another 500 dollars to spill on one 32GB intel SSD for the MAXIQ cache. I'm at work right now but when I get home I will post some speeds of my raid and talk a little more on this if anyone is interested.

My RIG:
Gigabyte 990fx-UD7 Motherboard (with dual EFI Bios) EFI bios IMPORTANT!!
AMD 8350fx 8 core CPU
32GB gskill sniper RAM 1866 MHz
Corsair H100i liquid cooling
Coolermaster Storm Scout 2 Case
Coolermaster 850W PSU
Adaptec 5805 w/BBU RAID 5 with 6x 2TB Seagate Barracuda 6GB/sec Sata III but only running at 3GB/Sec with the Controller. I believe the 6 series adaptec controllers have the 6GB/Sec as an option but hell mine is fast enough so why the hell would i need 6Gb/sec Sata 3 I just don't need it. current HDD's are not that fast anyway.


Settings: (remember all my testing has been done with an Adaptec 5805 w/BBU)
1-MOBO has to be able to support the card. for all the 5 series and 6 series controllers YOU CAN NOT HAVE UEFI BIOS or you need some way to disable UEFI and enable EFI BIOS. I looked and I don't think any board with UEFI bios allows you to be able to disable it. but that being said I could be wrong about disabling the UEFI.
2- You have to Attach the Controller to the 8x PCIe port that is not dedicated to graphics. so if you have one bandwidth of PCIe on your Board and you have a graphics card in the 16x PCIe slot the Adaptec will not boot. hence the reason i got the UD7 Motherboard it has dual bandwidth for PCIe so I can attach one graphics card to the 16x_1 Slot and my Raid controller the the 8X_2 slot. running on different bandwidths. it boots up nicely and has no problems what so ever.

3- You MUST MUST MUST have at least one Fan Blowing directly on the Adaptec 5805 or whatever Adaptec controller you have. THESE MOTHERS GET HOT!!!! and as we all know things don't tend to communicate correctly when they are as hot as the core of the earth. so cool the mother down with a nice little fan. that will keep it good enough! promise. I have two 120mm fans blowing on mine and it stays around 40 c. which is optimal temp for the controller.

4- Raid Level 5 we know is not the best at writing but reading from a RAID 5 is Fast!! and i can deal with the slower write speeds. its for long term storage anyways. but when i wanna pull something off its super fast and i'm enjoying the speeds. i have never experienced speeds like i'm seeing so i'm loving it. I chose raid 5 for a lot of reasons. I don't have time to go into that but needless to say i'm going to be monitoring the array so as soon as one HDD fails on me I will get a new one and rebuild the Array FAST as to not loose another HDD during the rebuild.

4- Before building your array go to adaptec.com and download the latest firmware for the card and windows/linux drivers you need to run the controller.
go into the device manager in windows and go down to the controllers you should see Adaptec 5805 or Adaptec "" there right click go to properties and update the firmware with the new one downloaded. like wise get the adaptec manager from the website as well and use that to upgrade the firmware of the drive. I can give you a link to how to do that later. sorry don't have time to find it just google it.

5- Controller Settings
Raid Array has to show up OPTIMAL in the boot or in the adaptec manager
in the adaptec manager make sure if you have a BBU or like it to select WRITE-BACK cache with BBU installed. also select the cache for reading. you can play with power settings but make sure all your PHY settings are the fastest possible. mine are all set to 3GB/sec.
Go into the WINDOWS 7 and go to My Computer right click on your array you have built and formatted and then it should show the little circle graph of your space and right below it is the setting for INDEXING the files on the drive. DESELECT INDEXING!! in other words you want INDEXING OFF for your array. however I left indexing on for my OS drive which is a completely different HDD than my Array and it works great. but turn the INDEXING OFF for your Raid array. make sure that the write cache is enabled for your other hard drives you have in your system like the one for your OS. that speeds it up considerably!!\

6- DON'T use third party File transfer programs such as Teracopy or any of the others just use plain old windows 7 file transfer. I tested this many many times and one of the reasons I was getting slow slow results was due to teracopy being on for some reason. don't understand why right now but it is how it is so i just use windows because i would much rather have the speed.

Results:
Briefly without going into a huge amount of Detail. with all those settings that I have mentioned above. Reading from the array to my OS HDD
2GB files start transfering at about 800MB/sec and goes down to about 600 MB/Sec at finish.
14GB files Start Transferring at about 500MB/sec and goes down to about 150MB/Sec after about the halfway mark. ending at about 150MB/sec

THESE are definitely speeds I enjoy!!!!

I'm totally happy with a 14GB file transferring completely in about 25 Sec and a 2GB file transferring in about 3 seconds. totally worth the money I spent!!! I never want to go back to anything else.

your results will vary depending on all the hardware of your computer but with those settings you should get the fastest speeds possible for your array. let me know if there is anything else you would suggest or apply. post your results below if you have time.
 

FireWire2

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With this set up and an SSD as second drive you should be able to transfer over 300MB/s easily. Same set up but with Areca/ATTO card and Hitachi drives I get about 600MB~700MB/s

I guess you need to call Adaptec to get support.
 

curveball323

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Jan 15, 2013
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Do you mean with Adaptecs MaxIQ cache enabled? MaxIQ uses an Intel 32Gb SSD drive as a cache. or do you mean by just doing a hybrid array with one SSD card in there. I'm assuming your saying the Cache because they don't make SSD in 2Tb as far as I know and If I did the hybrid array with an SSD in the array then all my drives would be dumbed down to whatever size the SSD is. Yeah I would like to get a SSD drive but adaptec only supports Intel 32Gb for the MaxCache as far as I know. I could be wrong.
 

FireWire2

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Sorry for not too clear :)
I mean set up HW raid5 with PCIe 8 Gen2. but mine are ARECA and ATTO cards, both read/write from a SSD is over 300MB/s
Benchmark about 600~700MB/s, there is something wrong with your set-up: firmware, driver, drive?!! lots of stuff need to consisder.
The best bet is call Adaptec
 

curveball323

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Jan 15, 2013
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Dude, did you not read any of my posts below the problem i was having? I even made a video of the speeds I have. go look at those.