RAID speed results

[Daynja]

I've wanted to go RAID for years, but I've never had the money. Well, I finally made it. I got four western digital 160GB hard drives with the 8MB cache. I chose to go with a cheaper "software" RAID card because I don't have THAT much money. I saw a card that supported RAID 5, and even if I didn't end up using it, it was nice to have and the card was only about $90. The card is a highpoint rocketRAID 454. I performed read and write tests using quickbench (and a different program, which nearly matched the results of quickbench shown here) with a single disk, RAID 0, RAID 10 and RAID 5. Latest BIOS and drivers were used. I'm not exactly pleased with the results, but they are what they are. Keep in mind that with RAID 0 the total size of the array is 600GB, RAID 10 is 300GB and RAID 5 is 450GB.

Sequential reads:
single disk: 46MB/sec
RAID 0: 41MB/sec
RAID 10: 40MB/sec
RAID 5: 41MB/sec

Sequential writes:
single disk: 33MB/sec
RAID 0: 82MB/sec
RAID 10: 41MB/sec
RAID 5: 14MB/sec

Perhaps I have set something wrong, and I really wish that is the case, but something just tells me that's how it is. I was expecting far superior read performance, but I didn't get that. The only real performance improvement over a single drive was with RAID 0, and that isn't an option for me. Slow write speed isn't really a problem to me, but I was hoping to get somewhere around 60MB/sec read speed.

Any comments or suggestions are welcome. Anyone else have any experience with the highpoint rocketRAID 454?

 

[tweeve2002]

those seem a bit low...My highpoint Rocket RAID 133 and My onboard VIA both benchmark about 56-58 MB/s for the average speed.

What is the stripe size, sometimes that can make a diffrence.

here is an interisting thing. My highpiont RAID is on my PCI and my VIA RAID that is onboard and they rate about the same, but my Intel SATA RAID That is also onboard gets about 84MB/s for the average speed I Like my SATA RAID

 

[Daynja]

Thanks for some data on your highpoint card. The stripe size is the default 64KB. My highpoint rocketRAID 454 is the only PCI card in the computer. All four drives are on their own IDE channel as master. Something seems to be limiting all the reads to about 40MB/sec. I really hoped 4 drives would be faster than this. Is there something other than the highpoint card that could be causing slower speeds? I've e-mailed highpoint's tech support, but I've already read about how good they are and I don't expect a response.

Anyone else care to share their expirences with IDE RAID?

 

[NesuD]

Try testing the read speeds with this it includes a database for comparison. looking at your single drive results look pretty normal However your Raid 0 results look backwards. writes are always slower than reads yet you are showing write results that look more like read results and vice versa.

Some things to consider about Raid 10. It is performance with fault tolerance not simply performance. There is a significant amount of overhead involved in mirroring particularly with a software RAID card so it would only be logical to assume that it would negatively impact the performance. I wouldn't have thought the hit would be that high however.

Raid 5 once again performance with fault tolerance but instead of mirroring you are using parity. more overhead calculating the parity data and writing it while simultaneously writing the regular data. Again i wouldn't have expected the hit to be that high however.

Have you tried different driver sets? I have found that the drivers with Software RAID cards can have an huge impact on the performance.

 

[Blazer]

seems low for the dollar,although you did not state your hardware.

raid 0 using sata wd raptors 74gb
random acc = 7.9ms
cpu utilization = 10%
avg read = 129.0 mb/s
seq read = 145.0 mb/s
stripe size = 16kb

just for comparision / using HD tach

 

[imported_Phil]

Seeing how your results slump so badly with RAID-5 (not that it doesn't run slower than other RAID types, of course), I'm going to say that the reason you are seeing slow speeds is because of your software RAID, albeit with an addin card.

 

[Daynja]

NesuD:
I will try HDTach. I will post the results soon. The only drivers I have tried are the latest ones from highpoint's website. With RAID 0 I was under the impression that writes and reads were both faster, and I would have expected both to be around 80MB/sec. But like I have said my read speeds seem to be limited to around 40MB/sec, no matter what type of RAID is used. Maybe I will try the older drivers?

blazer:
I'm using a P4 2.8c with a chaintech 9PJL Apogee (865 chipset) motherboard. 2x512MB corsair XMS DDR400 in dual channel mode.

Dopefiend:
I would blame the "software" nature of it as well, if it were hitting the CPU hard. But it isn't. The CPU averaged less than 10% during all tests.

 

[V00D00]

with 1 of my drives I get 48MB/sec, but it's a 300gb drive and the platter density is much higher.

 

[Garlic]

2 x 120gb Pata 7200rpm 8mb cache western digitals with SATA adapters connected to VIA southbridge SATA raid 0 = 102.6 MB/s