PCI RAID card slowing performance of entire machine?

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Burner27

Diamond Member
Jul 18, 2001
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I have 4 x 2TB Seagate Barracuda LP (Yeah I know--bad decision but they were cheap--and now I know why) attached to this PCI RAID card:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816132026

I think my machine's performance could be better but I am not sure if it is being hindered by the fact that these drives are running at SATA I speed or that they are connected to a PCI card?

The other 6 SATA ports that are part of the ICH10R are all being used, that's why i got this controller.

Thoughts?
 
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Rifter

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
11,522
751
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I dont think its the drives, i would be looking at the RAID card, i think PCI will be a bottleneck.

I own 3 1.5TB LP's running in a software RAID 5 array off a linux server and the performance is about what you would expect from linux software RAID5, can read at about 100MB/s and write at 50-60MB/sec.

What speeds are you getting off the drives and what type of raid are you running?
 
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Mark R

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
8,513
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A PCI slot is barely fast enough for a single SATA drive - even a low performance one like the LP series.

Hanging a RAID off a PCI slot will causes severe contention and bottlenecking.

E.g. PCI is 133 MB/s theoretical max - or about 100 MB/s practical max. This is even worse in RAID 1 where data is doubled up - so you'll be limited to 50 MB/s writes - which is a lot slower than a single drive on its own.
 
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CurseTheSky

Diamond Member
Oct 21, 2006
5,401
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Mark R said:
A PCI slot is barely fast enough for a single SATA drive - even a low performance one like the LP series.

Hanging a RAID off a PCI slot will causes severe contention and bottlenecking.

E.g. PCI is 133 MB/s theoretical max - or about 100 MB/s practical max. This is even worse in RAID 1 where data is doubled up - so you'll be limited to 50 MB/s writes - which is a lot slower than a single drive on its own.
Click to expand...

If nothing else, let that be a lesson as to why you want to avoid USB 2.0 for an external hard drive interface as well. eSATA / Firewire / USB 3.0 are leaps and bounds better. The only thing USB 2.0 has going for it in terms of external hard drives is convenience.
 
RebateMonger

RebateMonger

Elite Member
Dec 24, 2005
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What are the RAID arrays being used for? Data or as a boot drive?

Assuming they don't include the boot drive, I'd:

1) Measure the performance of the various disks with the RAID controller attached. I'd normally use the free HDTune, but that does only measure Read speed. Or use whatever measurement that represents why you believe system performance is slow (boot time?).
2) Shut down the PC and remove the PCI RAID controller
3) Boot up and remeasure the performance.
 
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Burner27

Diamond Member
Jul 18, 2001
4,452
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The RAID 1 is for maintaining images i have created for running VMs. The RAID 0 is used for video conversion.

The Onboard ICH10R is being used this way:

SATA 0 = Intel 80GB SSD AHCI Mode
SATA 1 = Intel 80GB SSD AHCI Mode
SATA 2 = Mushkin Callisto 60GB SSD AHCI Mode
SATA 3 = Western Digital 2TB Green AHCI Mode
SATA 4 = Samsung DVD-/+ R/RW optical drive
SATA 5 = Open

RAID 1:


Uploaded with ImageShack.us


RAID 0:


Uploaded with ImageShack.us
 
mtnd3vil

mtnd3vil

Member
May 16, 2006
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You haven't revealed anything else about your system other than it having an ICH10R, which means you should have gotten a PCIe storage controller and not one for your legacy I/O connector. Surely you have an available PCIe 4x or even 16x slot?

What's been said here is absolutely correct, the entire PCI bus only has ~100MB/s bandwidth and you're seeing this with your 110MB/s seq read speed. For reasons unknown, your seq write speeds are horrifyingly low for both your raid 1 and raid 0 arrays. The worst part is that this speed seems to scale appropriately for raid 0 vs raid 1 so I feel that it is a controller/drive limitation that you're not going to easily fix.

It looks like you're pretty serious about your storage subsystem and have committed a sizable amount of money to it. The only thing to do here is to get a new controller that operates at PCIe x4 or x8. I can suggest a good one to you if you tell me what motherboard you have.

I have a nice PCIe 8x four channel SATA RAID card in the PCIe x16 (video card) slot of my LAN server (see sig) running the four 500GB seagates. The performance rocks pretty hard.
 
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Burner27

Diamond Member
Jul 18, 2001
4,452
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101
Current setup is:

Asus P6T Deluxe V2
Intel i7 950
12GB Corsair PC3-16000
EVGA GTX260
Soundblaster Fatality PCIe sound card
Corsair 850W PSU
Coolermaster HAF 932 Case

These are the drives on the ICH10R:

SATA 0 = Intel 80GB SSD AHCI Mode
SATA 1 = Intel 80GB SSD AHCI Mode
SATA 2 = Mushkin Callisto 60GB SSD AHCI Mode
SATA 3 = Western Digital 2TB Green AHCI Mode
SATA 4 = Samsung DVD-/+ R/RW optical drive
SATA 5 = Open

And I have the 4 x 2TB HDD on that add-in RAID card.
 
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Silenus

Silenus

Senior member
Mar 11, 2008
358
1
81
Burner27 said:
Current setup is:

Asus P6T Deluxe V2
Intel i7 950
12GB Corsair PC3-16000
EVGA GTX260
Soundblaster Fatality PCIe sound card
Corsair 850W PSU
Coolermaster HAF 932 Case

These are the drives on the ICH10R:

SATA 0 = Intel 80GB SSD AHCI Mode
SATA 1 = Intel 80GB SSD AHCI Mode
SATA 2 = Mushkin Callisto 60GB SSD AHCI Mode
SATA 3 = Western Digital 2TB Green AHCI Mode
SATA 4 = Samsung DVD-/+ R/RW optical drive
SATA 5 = Open

And I have the 4 x 2TB HDD on that add-in RAID card.
Click to expand...

As has been mentioned the PCI interface is a huge bottleneck even for regular hard drives. Since you should have open PCIe slots, something like this would be a huge improvement:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816131003
 
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FishAk

Senior member
Jun 13, 2010
987
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You don't need much speed for your DVD and Green drive. If you booted those, and one of your SSDs off the Intel controller, you could RAID your Seagate drives with the ICH10R. You could get a cheap PCIe controller card for your booted drives, but I don't know the best way to handle the SSD. Perhaps a cheap PCIe card would do OK with an SSD, but if not, you could do something like sell both the Intels, and buy a 160Gb to replace them. Then all the SSDs could fit on the Intel controller.
 
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FishAk

Senior member
Jun 13, 2010
987
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I think that the worst possible case would be that you don't get the full potential of whichever SSD you put on that card. More likely though, is that it would work good. Keep whichever SSD your OS is on, on the Intel controller.
 
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Burner27

Diamond Member
Jul 18, 2001
4,452
50
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Or I could just move 2 of the Barracuda LPs over to the ICH10R and RAID 1 them, keep all three SSDs also on the ICH10R as well as the DVD Writer. Then I could keep the WD Green and the other 2 Barracudas on the new controller.....
 
swerus

swerus

Member
Sep 30, 2010
177
0
0
It is a raid controller.


Provides RAID 0 (Striping) to greatly increase the performance of data transfer by simultaneously writing data to 2 drives

Provides RAID 1 (Mirroring) to protect the data from a disk failure by writing identical data on 2 drives

RAID 0+1 (Mirrored-Striping) combine both Striping and Mirroring technologies to provide both the performance enhancements that come from Striping and the data availability and integrity that comes from Mirroring

RAID 1+S (Mirrored-sparing) can automatically replace the failed drive and rebuild the system when booting HDD is failed

Supports ATAPI commands

Supports Spread Spectrum in receiver

Independent 256-byte FIFOs (32 bit * 64 deep) per Serial ATA channel for host reads and writes

Compliant with PCI Specification, revision 2.2

Integrated PCI DMA engines

Four Pin header on board for LED connection

Supports with 32 bit and 64 bit drivers for Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0, Windows 2000/XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista

Acts as NON-RAID when not BIOS configured RAID
 
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FishAk

Senior member
Jun 13, 2010
987
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OK, I didn't look at the specs.

I think at this point, he is just looking for an inexpensive controller card that won't kill a single SSD's performance so he can make room on the ICH10R for a 4 disk array.

So do you think this card would perform that function, and if not, do know of one that would?

EDIT: now that I have looked at the specs, I see that it is, in fact, not a RAID card.
 
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swerus

swerus

Member
Sep 30, 2010
177
0
0
No its not a raid card, its a raid controller. As far as a cheap controller I don't know of a good one. I would shop around on sites with for sale sections and try and find someone selling a real raid card for half price of retail. I found a RR 3510 on [H] for around $150.

Also if he were to get the right platter drives, and use the ICH10r to raid them you can get really nice performance on the cheap. I would use the intel ssd for os and apps, and arrays for large apps and or fast storage.

This is my current OS drive on the intel controller, with short stroked WD 640 blacks. I will end up getting a SSD for os and apps one day.

 
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swerus

swerus

Member
Sep 30, 2010
177
0
0
So what its just an extender that piggy backs raid off the intel controller? Or are the specs lying?

Edit..

The link in the op is for the RC-222, I think that is where our confusion is coming form. My bad I just saw his second link.. Multitasking FTL on my part.
 
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