Intel X-25 M extremely slow read speeds

[Sunburn74]

Hi. I'm having trouble with my X-25M Raid0 setup. I have 2 X-25ms in raid 0 and recently recreated my raid array and reinstalled Win7. Prior I was getting read speeds of 500 mb/s+. Now my read speeds are <300mb/s. The only difference I know is I changed the data stripe to 4k. I can't think of anything else.

Can you guys help me trouble shoot my slow read speeds? My gut is telling me that for some reason my drives are being capped at 150mb/s but I can't figure out why that would be so.

http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/3249/hdtachversion3040fornon.jpg

My cpu utilization is crazy high. I don't know why the pc is at idle...

 

[TC91]

It's your stripe size; change it to 64K or 128K. It looks like you are using your motherboard RAID controller which is completely dependent on your cpu for processing, so your cpu is doing all the calculations to stripe the files in 4K parts which will cause huge cpu usage for larger files (sequential read/write especially). The only way to lower the cpu usage and increase the read speed again is to increase your stripe size or to buy a real hardware RAID controller.

 

[Sunburn74]

Hi, thanks for the response. I moved to a 128kb stripe and performance actually got worse. Now I'm getting 250mb/s combined. I really have no idea whats going on. I even secure erased both drives to get them back to factory state and that didn't help. Please assist. I have the latest intel chipset and RST drivers...

 

[TC91]

How full are your drives? Have you tried testing the drives individually as well?

 

[taltamir]

try changing it to whatever stripe size you originally were using when you were getting 500+ speeds...
Also, are you destroying the array and creating a new one, or using some program to alter the size?

 

[Old Hippie]

Test each drive individually.

Check your alignment.

Are you using the Intel drivers with write caching enabled?

 

[Sunburn74]

Hey guys, thanks for all the suggestions. TC91 was indeed correct about the stripe size and the cpu utilization. SSDs work best with sizes of 64 or 128KB and in changing that my cpu utilization dropped to normal levels. Anyway, I think the problem was my X-25M G1s (which don't have trim) after over a year of use, and after 6 consecutive OS installs, got so fragmented that they could not recover on their own.

I performed a secure erase to restore to factory conditions and the problems went away. Thanks again for all the suggestions. I'm back up to 540 mb/s sequential reads

 

[taltamir]

Hey guys, thanks for all the suggestions. TC91 was indeed correct about the stripe size and the cpu utilization. SSDs work best with sizes of 64 or 128KB and in changing that my cpu utilization dropped to normal levels. Anyway, I think the problem was my X-25M G1s (which don't have trim) after over a year of use, and after 6 consecutive OS installs, got so fragmented that they could not recover on their own.

I performed a secure erase to restore to factory conditions and the problems went away. Thanks again for all the suggestions. I'm back up to 540 mb/s sequential reads

did you update the firmware on those?

 

[Sunburn74]

yeah i updated it about 6 months ago. thanks for asking. I have the x-25m g1's which apparently are pretty resistant to degradation. That being said, I have used the heck out of them.