GA-990FXA-UD5 SLOW RAID

[mgmguy9958]

I have a new build using a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5 motherboard. I setup a RAID 10 using 4 OCZ Vertex 3 SSDs. These drives have peak read speeds of over 500MB/s each and using a RAID 10 I should get 4x read speeds giving me roughly 2000MB/s peak reads. I am only getting 700MB/s peaks. Why the dismal failure here? My EVGA board with Intel processor gets much closer to the target using the same drives... Any ideas?

[absic]

Hi there,

First off I think you are being a little optomistic if you're planning on peak read speeds of 2000Mb/Sec even from a RAID10 Array 

I have also noticed issues with speed when it comes to running a RAID Array on an AMD platform although I have only tested with RAID0. I feel a lot of this is due to the AMD drivers as the problem seems to be noticed across different motherboards I have tried.

You might like to look through this part of my Living Review for the GA-990FXA-UD5: http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,5704.msg45819.html#msg45819 where I have posted some tests I did recently using SSD's in RAID0 using different AHCI drivers and both the AMD and Marvell controllers.

[mgmguy9958]

Hi there,

First off I think you are being a little optomistic if you're planning on peak read speeds of 2000Mb/Sec even from a RAID10 Array 

I have also noticed issues with speed when it comes to running a RAID Array on an AMD platform although I have only tested with RAID0. I feel a lot of this is due to the AMD drivers as the problem seems to be noticed across different motherboards I have tried.

You might like to look through this part of my Living Review for the GA-990FXA-UD5: http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,5704.msg45819.html#msg45819 where I have posted some tests I did recently using SSD's in RAID0 using different AHCI drivers and both the AMD and Marvell controllers.

Thanks for the link, I'll check it out. I wouldn't say I'm being too optimistic since I have seen far better speeds on other rigs I have. I understand 2000 MB/s may be a little much and that's why it's a "peak speed". I just feel like 700 MB/s is way too slow considering the setup. I have 2 of the same OCZ drives in another computer right now that are in a RAID0 getting about 700 so 4 in a RAID 10 should blow that away. Confused......

[mgmguy9958]

absic,

Great review of the board! Hey one question though, where do I find the Microsoft AHCI drivers? I scoured the interwebs and found nothing... I am doing 5 of this particular build and I'd like to try the MS drivers on the next one. Thanks!

[absic]

Hi there,

The MS AHCI Driver is actually part of the Windows 7 OS and is installed automatically by default if you don't load the AMD driver..

[mgmguy9958]

Hi there,

The MS AHCI Driver is actually part of the Windows 7 OS and is installed automatically by default if you don't load the AMD driver..

Maybe I'm being dense....When installing Windows onto the RAID, you need to install drivers before Windows will see the logical disk. The only drivers I have to install at that point are the ones that come from AMD. ...or am I missing something?

[absic]

Maybe things are a little different when you are setting up a RAID5 or RAID10 array but when I set up the RAID0 Array the drives were automatically detected by the AMD chip and assigned to the array. Windows 7 saw this array and I didn't have to install any drivers at F6 to proceed with the OS installation.

What BIOS version are you running?
I was running F5c when I tested my SSD's and I think I was using F3 when I did my initial tests with HDD's.

If you have a chance to experiment can you see what happens if you uninstall the AMD AHCI Drivers once Windows has installed?

[mgmguy9958]

Yeah, when installing to my RAID 10 using OCZ SSDs the RAID was not recognized at install, I'll try uninstalling the AMD drivers once I build the next one. It will be a few days before I do that build but I'll check back in. Thanks!!!

[Wigpo]

4 SSDs in RAID10 shouldn't be faster than 2 SSDs in RAID0, since RAID10 is RAID 0 + RAID 1. In other words you stripe disks and then mirror them which means that yuor computer is only writing data to 2 drives and the other two are just a copy.