RAID 0 Volume Poor Performance

[gregpierce]

I am experiencing very poor performance on my new RAID 0 striping volume. Here are the specs:

Motherboard MSI x48 Platinum
Intel Hardware RAID (set to raid 0 in bios)
Two 1TB drives installed (NOT using for OS boot)

When I started copying files to my new volume, I noticed the transfer speed was under 50MB/s, which is about half of what I'm getting on single drive to single drive file transfers on the same machine (I'm using all 6 SATA ports on this mobo).

I ran a benchmark program and here are the results on my RAID 0 volume (anyone know what's wrong here? I don't know where to look):

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 137.158 MB/s
Sequential Write : 51.598 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 44.715 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 49.007 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.693 MB/s [ 169.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 2.176 MB/s [ 531.2 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.777 MB/s [ 189.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 2.469 MB/s [ 602.9 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [F: 15.3% (284.3/1863.0 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2012/06/23 12:23:04
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x86)

 

[larkspur]

What are the exact makes/models of the 1tb drives used in the array?

 

[mightymaxio]

Could be that your maxing out your Sata Controller abilities since you are using all the ports on the motherboard. I would buy a Sata PCIE card and make sure your not using 5200rpm 1tb drives. If you are using 7200 rpm drives what is the cache on them? 16mb and lower is going to slow down a 1tb drive.

 

[gregpierce]

What are the exact makes/models of the 1tb drives used in the array?

1) SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache
2) Western Digital Black 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA

 

[gregpierce]

Could be that your maxing out your Sata Controller abilities since you are using all the ports on the motherboard. I would buy a Sata PCIE card and make sure your not using 5200rpm 1tb drives. If you are using 7200 rpm drives what is the cache on them? 16mb and lower is going to slow down a 1tb drive.

You're saying just having all the channels filled slows down the controller significantly (by 75% by my estimation), even if the drives aren't transferring? Both have 32MB cache, and are 7200 RPM highly rated drives. I'll try unplugging all but my OS drive and the RAID drives and get back to you.

 

[nukemaster]

1) SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache
2) Western Digital Black 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA

It is not generally recommended to mix and match drives. I am not saying you can not, but I have never seen it to work that well on onboard raid like this.

I had 3 WDC blacks(same drive) and one just by having AAM(still do not know why it was on) on messed everything up(very strange performance). After a quick edit to make them the same speed(AAM was effecting random speeds and access times), all was well again.

I am not all the concerned with cache for anything that is sequential either. Many small read/writes may be helped.

 

[gregpierce]

It is not generally recommended to mix and match drives. I am not saying you can not, but I have never seen it to work that well on onboard raid like this.

I had 3 WDC blacks(same drive) and one just by having AAM(still do not know why it was on) on messed everything up(very strange performance). After a quick edit to make them the same speed(AAM was effecting random speeds and access times), all was well again.

I am not all the concerned with cache for anything that is sequential either. Many small read/writes may be helped.

Okay so I just made sure I didn't have AAM, and I don't. Then I benchmarked the drives individually (non-raid) and the write speeds improved significantly (results below). So either this raid controller is junk, or I really do need to match my drives. It's funny because I've read a bunch about that, and mismatched drives aren't often discouraged very strongly. These results are very discouraging for mismatched drives. Maybe I'll just set it to JBOD and forget about striping, to save me a few bucks. Thanks for your input.

DISK 1:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 136.569 MB/s
Sequential Write : 132.329 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 52.786 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 81.226 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.714 MB/s [ 174.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.312 MB/s [ 320.2 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.613 MB/s [ 149.8 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.380 MB/s [ 336.9 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [F: 0.0% (0.1/931.5 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2012/06/23 21:17:42
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x86)

DISK 2:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 143.778 MB/s
Sequential Write : 130.177 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 51.208 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 63.406 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.616 MB/s [ 150.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.247 MB/s [ 304.4 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 0.755 MB/s [ 184.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.253 MB/s [ 305.9 IOPS]

Test : 1000 MB [G: 0.0% (0.1/931.5 GB)] (x5)
Date : 2012/06/23 21:27:01
OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x86)

 

[gregpierce]

PS. JBOD resulted in same crappy write performance. WTF...Boo! Back to individual disks I guess for now.

 

[gregpierce]

It is not generally recommended to mix and match drives. I am not saying you can not, but I have never seen it to work that well on onboard raid like this.

I had 3 WDC blacks(same drive) and one just by having AAM(still do not know why it was on) on messed everything up(very strange performance). After a quick edit to make them the same speed(AAM was effecting random speeds and access times), all was well again.

I am not all the concerned with cache for anything that is sequential either. Many small read/writes may be helped.

The plot thickens. I just tried 2 identical 500GB Western Digital Black 7200RPM 32MB Cache drives in hardware RAID 0 and got the same crappy results. So it's definitely not the drives being mismatched. I also tried the drives in JBOD and the write speeds were still 1/2 of what they are with the drives in non-RAID configuration. The mismatching drives didn't effect this. Any advice other than getting a new motherboard or RAID controller? Could there be something going on with my Windows configuration, drivers or whatnot?

 

[nukemaster]

Very strange indeed.

You do have the latest Intel drivers and RST software installed.

I have used Intel Raid0(it is actually software as far as I know, but for raid0 it should not be that bad at all) on x975 P35 X58 all with the expected results.

Does HD tune show the same thing?
http://www.hdtune.com/

 

[arkoon]

The plot thickens. I just tried 2 identical 500GB Western Digital Black 7200RPM 32MB Cache drives in hardware RAID 0 and got the same crappy results. So it's definitely not the drives being mismatched. I also tried the drives in JBOD and the write speeds were still 1/2 of what they are with the drives in non-RAID configuration. The mismatching drives didn't effect this. Any advice other than getting a new motherboard or RAID controller? Could there be something going on with my Windows configuration, drivers or whatnot?

I am currently using MSI X-48 Platinum. Not X-48C Platinum. I have 3 x OCZ Vertex 2 SSD's in RAID 0, saturating the ICH 9R @600+ MB/s.
Make sure you are plugged into the ICH 9R (4 forward-facing, light purple SATA Ports), not the Marvell ( 2 SATA Ports, one red one black).
The Marvell tops out at about 133 MB/s on it's best day. With a tailwind...
Enable Write ahead cache in properties>policies of each drive as well as in the Intel iastor GUI.
Also, it you are copying a file or folder ON the RAID 0 it may be slow, as opposed to writing FROM a separate drive or RAID Volume.