GA-X58A-UD3R RAID 5 Slow

[micro_mag]

I have 3 2TB (ST2000DL003) on the Intel controller setup as RAID 5 and getting slow performance out of them.  Windows copy starts off above 100MB/s and quickly drops to 16 - 25MB/s.  I also have 2 1.5TB (ST31500341AS) on the same controller setup as single drives and get better performance copying files to and from them around 60MB/s.  Granted this is not the best way to benchmark performance I would expect to copy files to the array faster than i would to a single drive on the same controller.

 I had 2 of the drives setup in RAID 0 and they were performing with no issues.  Only after putting it in RAID 5 did it slow down.

I decided to initialize drive to see if that will do anything and after 6 hours of running it is only 1% completed so at this rate i should be done in 1 month.

Are there any known problem with RAID 5 on the Intel?  Is there something I have missed?

Thanks

[Aussie Allan]

 Firstly these a "GREEN" drives and will have multiple issues raiding, they also run at 5900rpm, not the fastest drives to raid again, there are some posts out there of a newish Firmware for your drives (BETA) that could improve performance.....again maybe!

If you insist using these,... Have you looked at driver caching in the raid management utility (Intel Matrix/Rapid Storage) be aware this should only really be implemented if you have a UPS.

 Can you get into the drives Bios to check how there set up regards , Noise/acoustic management, set all to high performance

 Turn off all power saving features you can get your fingers near.

 You could also try moving the non raid drive off the ICH10R controller (SATA Port) and put it on Marvell or GSATA port..... might get you a little more!

 Raid 5 with three of these drive .... I could not even guess what speed you might get.... maybe 120, ....maybe 200, ... but with 3 better matched drives 250- 260 read /220 write is possible

 Aussie Allan

[Dark Mantis]

Allan is quite correct when he said that these Green drives are not suposed to be used for RAID arrays. Apart from being slower and not performing as well they will try and power down all the time as part of their power saving regime. This is obviosly not recommended in this type of situation.

If you are using the RAID5 as your boot drive I would leave it on the SATA2_0 ports and above. Then move the other hard drives to the GSATA ports and the optical drive to the Marvel port.

All hard drive ports should be set to AHCI/RAID and the optical drives port to IDE mode.

[micro_mag]

Sorry I should have mentioned that the purpose of the array is to hold my movie collection and serve them up on demand. 

I tested it for a few days with no data to ensure when the drives power down and come back up the controller doesn't error out and say the drives are offline.  So from this standpoint the drives will do what is required in a RAID 5 config.  I have over 2 TB of data to copy onto the drives at this performance it will take me a day to just copy what I currently have.  I believe that performance should be faster and wanted to know if this normal.

[Aussie Allan]

 The Parity write is going to kill your performance every time with these discs in the Raid5 loop, if you can't bare to part with them, under the circumstances , you may want to consider/test raid 1+0.......this would probably perform better with your list and still give you some parity.

 Aussie Allan