Raid 5 help please!

[Simon Buxton]

I recently built a windows system based on the Asus Rampage IV motherboard. Using it's onboard Raid with 4 x 4tb WD Black drives i'm only getting 15.34MB/s Read and 55.56MB/s write. The build is using windows 8 Pro.

I have installed new drivers and got a marginal increase to the figures above. Can someone point me in the right direction please?

Thanks

Simon

 

[houkouonchi]

I recently built a windows system based on the Asus Rampage IV motherboard. Using it's onboard Raid with 4 x 4tb WD Black drives i'm only getting 15.34MB/s Read and 55.56MB/s write. The build is using windows 8 Pro.

I have installed new drivers and got a marginal increase to the figures above. Can someone point me in the right direction please?

Thanks

Simon

Get a hardware raid controller. Pretty much all onboard raid is crappy software raid (A.K.A. fakeraid) and performance sucks with parity raid modes.

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

Use raid class server drives (enterprise, constellation, etc, etc), using consumer drives will work short term or for raid0, but will probably not hold up to long term raid5/6 use, and I would suggest a raid controller, like Atto/Areca/3ware.

 

[Jon Thomasberg]

Something is misconfigured or you have faulty drive(s)/ bad SATA cable(s). There is no reason why even 1 drive should be that slow, much less a 4 drive RAID. I have 2 workstations using the Asus R4E and neither has the problems you cite. Also, what RAID level did you configure it with? A hardware RAID card like an ATTO would help performance, but I would venture that this is not the problem you are experiencing since your current performance is abnormally low.

 

[Simon Buxton]

thanks guys.

Im trying to avoid buying a raid card on principle that i saw benchmarks for this board that were satisfactory.

I will try removing the raid and rebuilding. I will test the drives one-by-one to see if there is a bad one? Any further help will be greatly appreciated...

 

[Simon Buxton]

I think i stumbled onto something. The raid is still initializing. Apparently it had hung at 19 %, i downloaded a new Intel driver / software and it now working its way to 100%.

Hopefully that's all the issue was. I'll confirm later for future reference.

 

[DJ Meyer]

Software Raid on non-parity schemes can be very good and at times better than hardware. Raid 0,1,10 etc

For parity arrays though yeah its crap.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Hopefully the initialization was the issue because those numbers were horrible and just plain wrong!

That said, the RAID host on the ASUS Rampage IV is pretty good -- I have the Extreme version of the board in a syatem and its a great motherboard. Probably the best ASUS motherboard I've ever used. I have not tested RAID-5 with it, as it didn't make sense in my setup. I am however using a 4-drive RAID-0 on the thing and I'm getting nearly 400MB/s reads and 350MB/s writes with 4 x 3TB WD RE4 HDD's. I'm not sure I would trust a parity / RAID-5 setup on a cheap motherboard integrated controller... Bad past experiences, once bitten, you know the story...

 

[David Kuhn]

Software Raid on non-parity schemes can be very good and at times better than hardware. Raid 0,1,10 etc

For parity arrays though yeah its crap.

This has been my experience also, and with drives being as cheap as they are a raid 10 setup isn't really that big of a price hit relative to 5 or 6.