Official GIGABYTE Forum

RAID1 performance

geohei

  • 14
  • 0
RAID1 performance
« on: February 01, 2013, 04:31:18 am »
Hi.

I urgently need advice.

Motherboard: GA-Z77X-UD5H w/ latest firmware F14

I installed two WD2003FYYS HDDs for RAID1 use.

While testing the created volume, I noticed write speed initially 130 MB/s and read speed the same. Should the read speed in RAID1 not be almost double since both HDDs are alternatively used for reading?

After that, I gave the second chipset a try. Marvell 88SE9172 GSATA. Same story. Write and read were approx. 115 MB/s.

Is this normal?
Did I misconfigure the RAID1 somehow?
Did I omit to install relevant software/drivers in order to benefit from increased read speed?

Thanks!
« Last Edit: February 01, 2013, 04:32:09 am by geohei »

Scracy

  • 44
  • 1
Re: RAID1 performance
« Reply #1 on: February 01, 2013, 10:41:06 pm »
You havent done anything wrong.You wont get any read speed benefit in raid 1 (mirror).If you want speed increase use raid 0 but with raid 0 there is no redundany so technicaly its not a raid level at all but it will increase both read and write speed significantly.
« Last Edit: February 01, 2013, 10:46:11 pm by Scracy »
Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD4H
i7-4770K @4.8Ghz 1.42V Stable 24/7
16Gb Corsair Vengeance Pro @2666Mhz
Gigabyte GTX-690 SLI
Koolance EX2-1055 (Exos-2.5)
Corsair AX860i PSU
Samsung EVO SSD 250GB x4 Raid 0 @1580MB/S Read 1210MB/S Write
Lian Li PC-B25F Chassis
WD Caviar Black 2TB
Samsung S27B970D

geohei

  • 14
  • 0
Re: RAID1 performance
« Reply #2 on: February 02, 2013, 01:51:50 pm »
Thanks very much for the confirmation. That answers my questions!

I did some investigations. I learned that the motherboard RAID is in fact a mixture of hardware and software (BIOS) RAID. Since I'm used to pure (dedicated) hardware RAID using PCIe RAID cards, I was used to RAID1 factor 2 read performance increase. Motherboard RAID1 is called "Fake-RAID1" in Linux world and this reduced performance is one of the reasons why.

Regards,
« Last Edit: February 02, 2013, 01:56:08 pm by geohei »