Question 4TB WD SN850X RAID 1 question ?

[_Jonathan]

PC Specs
MB: ASRock Z690 PG Velocita
CPU: i7 14700k,
GPU: 4070 Ti Super
RAM: 64GB DDR5
Storage: 2 x 4TB WD SN850X Gen 4 SSDs configured in RAID 1.
Fresh install of Windows 11 Pro with all updates and current drivers.

After running several tests with CrystalDiskMark 1gib and 5gib my results are as follows. They seem off to me and I am wondering if having them installed in RAID 1 is the reason but in particular the bottom two random tests seem slower than I would think they would be. Would someone with more expertise than me please confirm if these results look correct or if they are indeed slow and what I might have done wrong that is causing this? Thanks!

SEQ1M (Q8T1) Read: 12094.54 MB/s Write: 6199.01 MB/s
SEQ1M (Q1T1) Read: 4597.62 MB/s Write: 5190.38 MB/s
RND4K (Q32T1) Read: 965.34 MB/s Write: 708.64 MB/s
RND4K (Q1T1) Read: 75.37 MB/s Write: 123.76 MB/s

 

[Misgar]

A quick thought is that since RAID 1 is a "mirrored" array, the system will have to write data to two drives which will probably be slower than writing data to a single drive.

Reading data back from two mirrored drives stands a chance of being faster (than a single drive), because you have the option (in theory) of reading consecutive blocks alternately from each drive in the pair. This might provide "double" the read speed of a single drive (but is not guaranteed).

If you're prepared to split the array and test a single drive on its own, you'll probably find the Random reads and writes are similarly "slow". Sequential reads/writes tend to be faster.

As a matter of interest, why are you running RAID 1. Do you need "high availability" in the event of a disk failure? Regardless, you need backups of the data on the array, if it is of any importance. RAID 1 is not a backup.

 

[USAFRet]

As above, I will also ask...Why RAID 1?

What is your actual data backup scenario?

 

[_Jonathan]

Thank you for the reply. I was always nervous about downtime because I use my computer for work so whenever I have upgraded I have always just spent whatever money was necessary to buy two drives instead of one to help in that instance. I back this 4tb array up to an external drive once a week that I keep semi "off site" away from my house. I did make sure to buy one of these drives from Newegg and one from Amazon just so I had a better chance of them being "different". In my last computer I believe I set the RAID 1 up through the Intel management software in Windows because I had already installed the OS. This time since the option was available I figured it would be better to set it up initially through the UEFI and then just install the RST driver when I started Windows 11 since the array was not recognized. I was able to do that and at least as far as I can tell although I am by no means an expert or even very proficient the system seems to be working. I was debating breaking the array and testing I just wasn't sure if doing that would open a can of worms for me getting it back to working without having to completely start over and reinstall windows and all the drivers, updates, etc. I did run the same crystal test with my laptop and the random read/write scores were similar but this drive is a standalone nvme drive and I'm sure it's inferior in performance since this Lenovo laptop was like a thousand dollars so it better be slower in pretty much all respects.

 

[USAFRet]

Thank you for the reply. I was always nervous about downtime because I use my computer for work so whenever I have upgraded I have always just spent whatever money was necessary to buy two drives instead of one to help in that instance. I back this 4tb array up to an external drive once a week that I keep semi "off site" away from my house. I did make sure to buy one of these drives from Newegg and one from Amazon just so I had a better chance of them being "different". In my last computer I believe I set the RAID 1 up through the Intel management software in Windows because I had already installed the OS. This time since the option was available I figured it would be better to set it up initially through the UEFI and then just install the RST driver when I started Windows 11 since the array was not recognized. I was able to do that and at least as far as I can tell although I am by no means an expert or even very proficient the system seems to be working. I was debating breaking the array and testing I just wasn't sure if doing that would open a can of worms for me getting it back to working without having to completely start over and reinstall windows and all the drivers, updates, etc. I did run the same crystal test with my laptop and the random read/write scores were similar but this drive is a standalone nvme drive and I'm sure it's inferior in performance since this Lenovo laptop was like a thousand dollars so it better be slower in pretty much all respects.

Physical drive fails are pretty rare.
And even with the RAID 1, you still need to take it down to wap in a new drive, when and if one of them actually fails.

A RAID 1 is only really needed for continued uptime. Like, if you were hosting a webstore, and actual downtime meant actual lost sales.

 

[_Jonathan]

That used to be the case but not so much anymore. I think it's probably not absolutely necessary but with how fast drives are these days I'm guessing I won't notice too much of a performance boost doing a RAID 0 setup and I don't really need the extra space of having both of these drives for storage so I'd like to keep it as RAID 1 . Thankfully it didn't cause me to not buy one of the other components I wanted for budget reasons so it's probably just a bit of an unnecessary spend. That being said I don't want it to make these drives perform poorly just to maintain this configuration.