Slow RAID 0 Performance with 74Gb 10K Raptors

[merlin]

I have a ASUS P5N32-SLI Plus with two 74Gb Raptors 10,000 RPM Drives. My read performance shows as follows

Sequential Read=46.8
Sequential Write= 147.3
Random seek=9.1

From what I know about RAID the Read speed should be in the 120 range. Anyone ever have this problem with the NF 680 boards?

Thanks Merlin

[David (PassMark)]

(NF 680 = NVidia nForce 680 chipset).

The Raptors are a bit old now, and the newly released 7200rpm drives match them for performance I believe. But nevertheless in a RAID 0 situation I would have expected the read speed to be higher.

You should check you have the latest device drivers for the RAID controller, defag the disks. If you wanted to take them out of the RAID set you could also look at the SMART values to see if there is a fault developing.

You might also want to try using the advanced disk tests in PerformanceTest to try a few different test scenarios.

[merlin]

(NF 680 = NVidia nForce 680 chipset).

The Raptors are a bit old now, and the newly released 7200rpm drives match them for performance I believe. But nevertheless in a RAID 0 situation I would have expected the read speed to be higher.

You should check you have the latest device drivers for the RAID controller, defag the disks. If you wanted to take them out of the RAID set you could also look at the SMART values to see if there is a fault developing.

You might also want to try using the advanced disk tests in PerformanceTest to try a few different test scenarios.

Thanks for the reply. All my Drivers are the latest for the NVidia nForce 680 chipset ver. 9.53. I took both drives out of RAID and checked the SMART results they where fine. I also re benchmarked them

I also benchmarked them without them in the RAID array with PT6.1 again and got the following results off the single drive.
WRITE 82.2
READ 44.0
Diskmark 478.7
I would almost expect these to be reversed write should be the read speed.

I have also tested with HD tach, PC mark and both of those have shown that the RAID 0 is getting the about the correct transfer a sustained 83.8MB/s READ

I did these tests with a fresh install of XP with the latest drivers. No other software installed.

Thanks

Merlin

[Ian (PassMark)]

You might try the equivalent test settings in the Advanced disk test to see what it tells you about the speed during the test intervals. The settings equivalent to the Standard disk read test are:

Test file directory: User AppData
Test file 500MB
Block size 16KB
Standard Win32 API (Uncached)
Asynchonous
IO queue length of 20
Test duration: 20 seconds
Read/Write level: 100% reading, 0% writing
Sequential/Random level: 100% sequential, 0% random

It might be that the driver doesn't like Asynchonous uncached access as much as synchonous cached access.

Regards,
Ian

[David (PassMark)]

We pulled out our 10K RPM Western Digital Raptor WD740GD for some tests.

Using PerformanceTest V6.1, and the standard disk test on a slightly fragmented disk, we got,
65.1 MB/Sec Read
66.1 MB/Sec Write

Using the advanced disk test settings that Ian posted, we got about the same result.




65MB/sec is about what is expected for these drives (which were released 3 years back in 2004). The performance can be better or worse depending on where the files are placed on the disk, fragmentation, the controller & device driver.

Unfortunately we don't have two if these drives available in a RAID configuration.

[merlin]

RAID 0 Performance - SOLUTION

I got to do some more testing on my Raptor 10K Raid 0 issue tonight

I found that if I disabled Command queuing in Windows Device manager - SCSI and RAID controllers - Nforce 590/570/550 serial ATA controller and unchecked the command queuing box restarted for both drives.

My Hard drive performance skyrocketed it went from the following

OLD
Sequential Read=46.8
Sequential Write= 147.3
Random seek=9.1

to

NEW
Sequential Read=140.9
Sequential Write= 153.3
Random seek=4.40

[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/dcarey/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot.jpg[/IMG][IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/dcarey/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.jpg[/IMG]

Computer boots so much faster and games load in no time. New Passmark rating 1648.8 New record for me. Filename BL8742

Thanks for everyones help!!

Merlin

[David (PassMark)]

Very interesting. Maybe there is some bug in the device driver, or maybe nVidia are trading off the seqentially speed in order to try and improve the random access times. But this seems like a poor trade off.

[merlin]

Speed!

Well whatever it is (I'm leaning toward bug in the driver) I am happy, Crysis loads so fast now and windows starts and shuts down so quick it is day and night differance. SPEED! SPEED! SPEED!