Experience with RAID5 performance (onboard Intel P67 chipset)

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Aaroona

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#210204 17-Mar-2017 19:09

I have a P8P67 Pro V3.0 - I have just picked up 4x2tb disks and was looking to use RAID5.

I managed to setup the RAID (not without its issues... broke my Windows installation... apparently a known issue with GPT installs).

However once I booted into Windows and formatted the 5.6TB drive, the performance was nothing short of crap. I could only get a max of 25MB/s, when in single disk mode, can achieve consistently around 120MB/s. (write speed).
Read speed wasn't an issue at over 300MB/s in RAID.

Has anyone else has issues with the on-board raid controller, particularly this chipset model? I know it's not as good as having a dedicated card, but I really didn't expect it to be that terrible.

I did have a read through this article here - but my drives were configured for 4K cluster size and 64k stripe size, which from that table says I should have gotten somewhat decent speeds.

timmmay

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#1742900 17-Mar-2017 19:14

What about using Windows storage spaces? They work well for me, I'm just using a mirrored pair but it can do something like RAID5. That's probably more portable between motherboards than whatever your motherboard has. It can do 150MB/sec from my main SSD.

Aaroona

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#1742902 17-Mar-2017 19:17

timmmay:

What about using Windows storage spaces? They work well for me, I'm just using a mirrored pair but it can do something like RAID5. That's probably more portable between motherboards than whatever your motherboard has. It can do 150MB/sec from my main SSD.

Thanks for the suggestion - I guess my main issue with that is, I'd be tied to Windows. Which right now, I'm struggling to love! I am potentially looking at moving to Ubuntu, but it would be great if I could retain some kind of OS-agnostic option, which is why I thought of the on-board RAID. My understanding is that it's pretty easy to move Intel RAID config to a new mobo.

timbosan

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#1743012 17-Mar-2017 21:03

Personally I would stay away from from RAID5 - without a grunty dedicated processor (as in on a controller card) you are going to get poor performance.

Why not try RAID10? Much faster reads and writes, and can handle losing 2 disks. The Intel chipsets are supposed to be very good performance wise with RAID10.

Aaroona

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#1743022 17-Mar-2017 21:24

timbosan:

Personally I would stay away from from RAID5 - without a grunty dedicated processor (as in on a controller card) you are going to get poor performance.

Why not try RAID10? Much faster reads and writes, and can handle losing 2 disks. The Intel chipsets are supposed to be very good performance wise with RAID10.

The difficulty with that, is I lose 50% of my capacity, otherwise I would have been keen.

If only 4TB disks were cheap. :| I got these 2TB's second hand from a friend, so not a chance of getting any more unfortunately.

timmmay

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#1743023 17-Mar-2017 21:24

Aaroona:

Thanks for the suggestion - I guess my main issue with that is, I'd be tied to Windows. Which right now, I'm struggling to love! I am potentially looking at moving to Ubuntu, but it would be great if I could retain some kind of OS-agnostic option, which is why I thought of the on-board RAID. My understanding is that it's pretty easy to move Intel RAID config to a new mobo.

If your motherboard fails, or you upgrade, you could lose access to your data. Well, apart from your backups. I figured on-board raid was a marketing feature, not a feature people actually used.

Would different operating systems need a different file system? My Linux server uses ext4, windows uses ReFS or NTFS. Wouldn't you want to use the native file format of your OS? So if you change your OS, you could change your storage.

Aaroona

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#1743040 17-Mar-2017 21:32

timmmay:

Aaroona:

Thanks for the suggestion - I guess my main issue with that is, I'd be tied to Windows. Which right now, I'm struggling to love! I am potentially looking at moving to Ubuntu, but it would be great if I could retain some kind of OS-agnostic option, which is why I thought of the on-board RAID. My understanding is that it's pretty easy to move Intel RAID config to a new mobo.

If your motherboard fails, or you upgrade, you could lose access to your data. Well, apart from your backups. I figured on-board raid was a marketing feature, not a feature people actually used.

Would different operating systems need a different file system? My Linux server uses ext4, windows uses ReFS or NTFS. Wouldn't you want to use the native file format of your OS? So if you change your OS, you could change your storage.

People have mentioned it's relatively easy to migrate intel RAID to a new mobo, apparently just need to "adopt foreign RAID" when first booting on the new mobo.

You're right, you'd want to use the native file system where possible, but I've found Linux in the later years has been able to handle NTFS quite well without any issues. (read and write)

Changing the storage as you suggest isn't the easiest option, since I don't have the equal amount of storage elsewhere.

The most important stuff is backed up, the rest would be incredibly annoying if lost and consume many hours to get back, but would prefer not to do that as you can imagine.

It is sounding like I need to tie myself to one or the other though... or maybe I need to look at a NAS enclosure.. was hoping to avoid that.

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Aaroona

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#1743067 17-Mar-2017 22:25

timmmay:

What about using Windows storage spaces? They work well for me, I'm just using a mirrored pair but it can do something like RAID5. That's probably more portable between motherboards than whatever your motherboard has. It can do 150MB/sec from my main SSD.

I've done some more thinking and I have decided to go ahead with using Storage spaces.

It does limit my ability to move my day-to-day machine to Linux for the mean time, but I will get around that by having Linux installed on my laptop.

WHen it comes to doing my desktop later down the road, I'll have to consider buying a NAS or something for the migration path.

richms

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#1743096 17-Mar-2017 22:46

I use the intel raid to stripe 3 sata SSDs for my windows volume, and 2 for my steam library.

Speeds are better on the 2 drive stripe than the 3, go figure.

But they are both hardly a great deal better than the single drive speeds. Not sure how much is the fake raid, and how much is bitlocker but very disappointing to not break the gig a second mark with 3 sata drives.

Richard rich.ms

Aaroona

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#1743110 17-Mar-2017 23:48

timmmay:

What about using Windows storage spaces? They work well for me, I'm just using a mirrored pair but it can do something like RAID5. That's probably more portable between motherboards than whatever your motherboard has. It can do 150MB/sec from my main SSD.

Interesting. Just tried Parity with Storage spaces, and the performance is equally as crap as RAID5.

This really isn't looking good.

timmmay

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#1743149 18-Mar-2017 07:49

I think you may have heard this before... but RAID is not a backup. Fire, theft, virus, a cup of coffee, any could destroy all your data. If it's worth putting in a RAID array it's worth backing up.

Not sure what to tell you about performance. Works fine here, i7-2600K, modern motherboard (one failed), 16GB RAM. It works as fast as a single drive, but mine is just a mirror, nothing fancy.

Aaroona

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#1743178 18-Mar-2017 10:14

timmmay:

I think you may have heard this before... but RAID is not a backup. Fire, theft, virus, a cup of coffee, any could destroy all your data. If it's worth putting in a RAID array it's worth backing up.

Not sure what to tell you about performance. Works fine here, i7-2600K, modern motherboard (one failed), 16GB RAM. It works as fast as a single drive, but mine is just a mirror, nothing fancy.

I totally understand that RAID is not a backup. As I mentioned earlier in the thread- the stuff that needs backing up, is. The rest of it is stuff that would be very inconvenient if lost, but should be recoverable by other means.

I'm running an i7-2600(non-K) and 8GB ram. Copying stuff to the parity drives barely touches my CPU, so not really sure what the bottleneck is.

I guess the only option from here is to purchase another drive and use mirror, or use them as separate drives.

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Hammerer

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#1743230 18-Mar-2017 12:09

You're getting crap performance from both hardware and software disk arrays which suggests that you've got a configuration issue or you have one or more bad disks.

Disable the onboard RAID in the firmware/BIOS.
Check the disk drivers and firmware. Are there known issues in support forums? Have you got the latest or the best for your motherboard? I haven't used Storage Spaces but I suspect that it may works better with some configurations than others.
Investigate individual disk performance which should also identify a problem drive. Onboard RAID and Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST) have been known to "hide" disk problems from the OS.
Investigate the array performance.

After I wrote this - I should have searched first - I found this useful post from a user with the same sort of problem. It might give you some other ideas:

http://www.overclock.net/t/1468336/intel-raid-5-poor-write-performance-what-fixed-mine

timmmay

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#1743241 18-Mar-2017 12:27

I'm running ReFS rather than NTFS, I wonder if that makes a difference. ReFS optionally has error checking and correction. I'm using HGST drives, like BackBlaze says are good, and they perform well to.

I ran a few benchmarks on my various disks. The Storage Spaces are is quite variable. In practice I can write data to it at 150MBps. Click to see full size.