Question New build with Raid 5 is slow ?

[Tony67]

I have a new systems with an Aorus Z690 i9 and am using 4 ironwolf pro 8tb in a raid 5. I am not the most tech savy and a friend built this for me. Everything seems to work fine and with virtually no software other than windows 10, its slow. I also am using the system board raid and not a card installed.

I use the quick launch to start file explore. The first time I launch this it takes 5, 10 or even 15 seconds to open. from time to time the PC just hangs 10-30 seconds. I notice the the HDD light is solid. Also all equipment is brand new. When I open task manager and disk usage is at 0%, all is fine. When it gets to 25-50% it acts up and slows. I think this is something to do with the raid and this is why. Using the 2.5gb port, I copy a small folder over thatss 12gb from the PC raid to my home NAS. Its at 286MB transfer as I would expect and near the middle of copying it drops really low then comes back up eventually. The inital time to copy was 1.5 minutes estimate and it takes about 5. When I copy the folder back to the pc, it starts off fine and then drops and takes 5 plus minutes to copy and then after the HDD usage is 25-50% for another 5 minutes plus. I try to open firefox as its in this phase and it takes over a minute to launch.

So I do the same test, same folder from a usb attached HDD to same pc. Transfer is 286MB and holds fairly close to that the entire transfer. Task manager shows HDD at 0% and all is fine, no slow down. I copy the same file back and same 286 transfer speed back, task manager shows 25% usage and when file is done, it drops to 0% and all fine. The problem only seems to be with the Raid setup for some reason. It also took almost a week to complete the raid initialization I believe. maybe a day or so less but it was long.

Any ideas or suggestions? Again I am not that great using the command promp commands and such.

 

[DSzymborski]

For what reason does this RAID even exist? It's pointless at best for >99% of consumer use and actively harmful at worst. Is this PC some kind of server or a workstation that has constant, very large, sequential workloads?

If that's not the case, wipe the RAID and start over. Because if this friend saddled a novice user with a pointless RAID, I'd wonder what else this numbskull did setting up this machine and you'd do better yourself.

 

[Misgar]

Are you booting Windows 10 from a separate drive, e.g. SATA SSD or M.2 NVMe drive? Although peak read speeds from RAID 5 should be faster, write speeds back to the array will probably not exceed that of a single drive.

The transfer speed reduction you are experiencing in the middle of a 12GB copy to NAS might be due to a folder on RAID containing many small files, e.g. 5MB or less.

Transfer rates will often slow down when both machines (RAID and NAS) encounter hundreds or thousands of small files in a group.

I experience similar unwanted "pauses" when copying small files to Linear Tape Open (LTO) cartridges. 50MB RAW image files copy direct to tape fine but contiguous blocks of small JPGs (less than 10MB each) sometimes lead to tape "shoe shining".
https://community.spiceworks.com/to...ay-be-causing-shoe-shining-should-i-zip-first

To get round this, I use WinRAR to archive directories full of very small files into one big file, before transferring to tape. You could try this on your system.

If you have a single 12GB file available, e.g. a high definition movie, try copying this from the RAID 5 system to the NAS. If you still get slow downs, report back here.

You could ask your friend if he scrubbed in the drives for a couple of days before setting up the array, to see if all disks were healthy. I don't use motherboard RAID nowadays, preferring LSI SAS controller cards. The dedicated hard disk controller allows the CPU to get on with other tasks, but your i9 should be more than capable.

I'm currently copying 520GB of holiday photos over to a new 8-drive TrueNAS Core RAID-Z2 array, built from 4TB Enterprise hard disks. N.B. RAID-Z2 is similar to RAID 6 which introduces another parity block.

The transfer rate to my RAID-Z2 array from portable SSD is currently 96MB/s over Gigabit Ethernet, so that's probably the maximum write speed of the array, not a limitation of Gigabit. I've just started the file compare and the RAID-Z2 array is reading back at 70MB/s (slower than writes).

I don't have a 10GbE NIC in this RAID-Z2 server, as it would be pointless given the read and write speeds of this array.

You could of course split up your RAID 5 array as suggested, which would release another 8TB of storage. Four 8TB drives in RAID 5 gives only 24TB of storage, plus 8TB taken up by parity. Four separate 8TB drives = 32TB of free space.

How you arrange four individual 8TB drives is up to you, but remember, you can never have too many copies of critically inportant data (preferably not all in the same place). If possible, move some of the 8TB drives to another machine, to reduce problems caused by ransomware, fire, PSU failure, etc. RAID 5 only "protects" you against one disk failure (in theory, but not necessarily in practice).

Alternatively, you could continue to experiment with RAID 5 and different file sizes. It's a learning process which can have its ups and downs, but only you know what suits you best. Enjoy.

 

[USAFRet]

Why the RAID 5?
Especially if this is the only storage in this system.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Any ideas or suggestions?

Sell the hard drives if you can't return them, get an SSD, and start over.

If you're worried about data backup, get an external hard drive. RAID is not a backup solution.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Sell the hard drives if you can't return them, get an SSD, and start over.

24TB of SSD storage will be expensive. LOL.