Drive speed issue

[pfiction]

I have 3 WD20EURS in a RAID 5 and created one partition of 3.6Tb. reading from it seems to be ok but when writing to it I'm getting on average maybe 9mps. this is crazy, why so slow?
I'm using Windows 7-64bit, installed on separate drive.

 

[Emulex]

your raid controller is the problem. need to have write cache enabled on drives, plus a battery/flash back write cache on the raid controller.

you have just realized what everyone else does when they build their first software raid-5

 

[SickBeast]

I'm wondering if software RAID is actually faster than hardware RAID. I'm setting up a striped dynamic disk in Windows for my games, and pairing it with "Fancy Cache". I'll create a thread with my findings once I'm done.

 

[pfiction]

i am a raid newbe, thanks for the help!

 

[groberts101]

I'm wondering if software RAID is actually faster than hardware RAID. I'm setting up a striped dynamic disk in Windows for my games, and pairing it with "Fancy Cache". I'll create a thread with my findings once I'm done.

no it won't. Use the hardware and suppliment with Fancycache. Bout as good as your gonna' get there unless you go with a nice card to offload all that compute intensive work.

 

[Emulex]

cheaper to get a raid-10 card for $25 ($50?) and buy another drive imo. though fancycache with raid-10 helps ALOT too especially when the power goes out for a few weeks.

 

[SickBeast]

I tried fancy cache and wasn't a big fan. I was hoping it would populate itself by scouring my gaming partition for small files automatically. It seems as though it gradually builds itself up over time. I also found it way too complicated. Really all I want it to do is to use my SSD to turn my gaming partition into a "hybrid" drive. It seems to have an L1, an L2, and a "virtual memory" cache. I don't want to sacrifice 2gb of my ram to it, and I don't want to have to keep my computer on all the time.

This has to be a simple program to create. All it needs to do is put the files that are smaller than 512kb onto the SSD. These guys got way too "fancy" IMO. Someone needs to create "SimpleCache".

 

[SickBeast]

no it won't. Use the hardware and suppliment with Fancycache. Bout as good as your gonna' get there unless you go with a nice card to offload all that compute intensive work.

My issue with hardware RAID is that I would have to dedicate my entire drives to it, plus if I upgrade my motherboard it becomes a useless royal PITA to migrate over to the new setup.

I've also read that software RAID is as fast or faster than hardware RAID in many cases. It's not like I have an expensive RAID controller on my motherboard.