Re: Server performance (sata raid 5)

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rossm wrote:

Hi all,

Im currently testing a server I have a dell PE830 with 4x 160GB SATA drives in a raid 5 setup on a CERC SATA RAID Controller.(lets not get into a SATA reliability argument i have a server with scsi drives in it currently and in the 3 years ive owned it ive had to repalce every scsi disk in it and one of them now is making a loud ticking noise)

The Raid array was created by dell before i got the server and i have since installed SBS2003 on it and im very happy with it all - but the drive speed is shockingly low. Im seeing Transfer speeds of 60mb/s - 63mb/s (in comparison old ATA drives are 125 sata 150 and a scsi drive around 320)

Interface speed is practically irrelevant, since all interfaces are capable of higher speeds than the drives themselves can manage (it's only relevant where the content you want is all in the drive's cache memory).

Your PE830 is equipped with 7200rpm drives. And 7200rpm drives are reaching sustained transfer rates of 50-60Mb/s for reads at best.

Looking at:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html?modelx=33&model1=117&model2=124&chart=34

I don't see any 160Gb drives managing better than 48Mb/s.

So, your RAID5 is certainly delivering better performance than a single disk could, but how good a RAID implementation it is is much harder to determine (you really need comparative figures from a range of servers).

I have tested it using simple file transfering as well as various hard drive benchmarking software.
currently the server is perfoming below expectations because of this slow disk speed - I have ran all the diagnostics and everything is fine, im using latest drivers / firmware /patches / bios etc.
Anyone have any ideas or is this the expected speed of a RAID 5 setup ? it takes around 7 mins to copy a 700MB file if i have two files copying at the same time then forget it i got bored :)

Out of interest, have you run the same speed tests on the server with SCSI?

--
Steve Foster [SBS MVP]
---------------------------------------
MVPs do not work for Microsoft. Please reply only to the newsgroups.
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