NF4 Expert - Slow RAID 5 Performance

[haplopeart]

I recently decided to leverage the Silicon Logic SATA Raid Ports on my Expert board.

 

I bought and installed 4 WD 400GB drives, the RE Model ones that are designed for Raid use. All that went well, the Raid built and formatted no issues. Files coping to and from without issue.

 

However I have noticed that the read/write performance isn't exactly stellar. I expect a certain level of degraded performance over a single drive (I am familiar with RAID, I work with RAID setups daily in my job). I realize that the onboard RAID probably isn't the most optimal. However the performance isn't even mediorce.

 

Seriously I have Drives mounted in USB portable carriers that read and write files faster than this RAID array.

 

Has anyone else built a RAID5 on this board/controller? How is your performance? I expected a little more out of SATA 150 Controllers and drives....

[BadWillHunting]

...I can't remember the exact details, but Happy_Games did some tests showing that the RAID5 implementation of the Silicon Image chipset was slow, MUCH slower than the NF4 RAID interface on these DFI boards. Try searching the forums for Silicon Image and slow or slow RAID5... there are some threads that talk about it with benchmarks and I think the solution was to run RAID off of the NF4 side and single drives on the SI.