Slow RAID0 performance (nvraid 4xHitachi SATAII - sluggish feel 2 wind

[robo989]

Hi, although my mobo went knees up today, its gonna get replaced pretty quickly and when it does I'd like to find out whats causing this strange behaviour on me raid0 array..

 

Righty, I got 4 of those new hitachi sata 2 drives 250GB versions in raid0 on the nvraid controller. They have all been unlocked for sata 2, sata spread spectrum, power managment has been disabled, acoustic management has been disabled, and so has smart. So basically they should be as fast as they possibly can be. They act the same with ncq onoff...

 

Here's how I can describe it...

 

Imagine you have only 1 hard drive but it is partitioned into 2 seperate partitions and then you copy a large file say 1GB+ from one partition to the other, you'll noticed windows is really sluggish, even right clicking the desktop and clicking properties, you'll be waiting a good 5 seconds+ for the properties page to appear? Ya with me, and similarly just double clicking my computer and there's loads of disk activity...

 

The stange thing is that their actualy ability to shift data at high speeds doesn't seem to be affected that much and the behaviour only happens after loading a lot of info from the drives...

 

Its as if virtual memory is being used? I just don't get it, I'm using decent sata cables, have tried both the original cables and some supposedly good "Akasa" ones, well they were expensive anyway.

 

its a real downer this, it feels like I only got 256mb ram in the computer, 1GB should be more than enough, its not even using it.

 

Is there a way to force windows to stop trying to cache everything in virtual memory. It also seems that the nvraid controller is using alot of cpu cycles...

 

1 thing tho, I am using the original .475 raid drivers for windows x64 do they have any issues. The thing is you need to reformat to upgrade the drives so I haven't tried others but I doubt its that, anyone elese getting this or can help me?

 

thank you, any suggestions and advice is greatfully accepted

 

Rob

 

(I mentioned this before but I didn't explain it well so sorry for repeating it)

[Mondo1287]

This behavior happens consistantly, or only when copying data around on the array?

 

If you're copying data to the same array it will go something like this, read data from 4 different drives, write data to the same 4 drives, its not going to be that fast and your computer would be pretty sluggish while that was going on. Windows is always writing to the page file, even if you have plenty of available ram. You might see a big difference by having your page file on another drive. Also all onboard raid solutions use your cpu to do the dirty work, the more drives, the more cpu usage. I'd take those other drives you're not using and put those back in and put your page file on those. Maybe even mirror them for your important stuff if you don't have other storage means. Now if its happening all the time, maybe something is up like one of the drives has some issues. You might want to run the drive manufactures testing utility on all the drives and make sure they check out.

 

 

Edit:

 

I just noticed your low stripe size, thats really going to hurt on large files.

[Guest Dangermouse]

Have you run HDTach? That will tell you your actual throughput and response times, and there are several posts on here you can compare against.

[Beliyaal]

This is probably because you are trashing the disk cache as you mentioned. I see three explainations for this:

1. Windows is swapping programs to disk to make room for caching more files.

2. Windows is throwing away other cached files from the cache. This could slow you down.

3. Both of the above.

 

Now I don't know if this will help, and ppl will most likely screem bloody murder for me suggesting it, but try this:

1. Change the setting My Computer(right click)->Properties->Advanced->Memory Usage: Change the setting to: System cache

2. If this does not work try disabling the pagefile on all drives.

 

I have the habbit of running without a swapfile to get around windows flawed swapping logic so I don't have any experience with the first option, but it would be interesting to hear what if any of these options fixes your problem.

[robo989]

Hi again,

 

No it happens even when transferring files to another drive altogether, I have two diamondmax 9s on the Sil3114 controller and it will be sluggish as hell after transferring a file over to them.

 

I'm currently only usinf the dm9s in raid0 and have unplugged the hitachi drives for now and although, the actual throughput of these drives is crap, it can write file back to itself and windows will be slowerer but, it feels as slow as it should be if that makes sense?

 

On the hitachi drives if I did some benchmarks I'm sure it wouldn't show up, running ATTO Tool shows nothing that strange, andif I use DVD Shrink and then say do a film with no compression and export it to a seperate drive it will be about 120mb a second which is pretty good, after doing it though it feels like I'm using a 486, although if I did another dvd shrink it would still get a good transfer rate again...

 

:confused:

 

thanks for the help so far

[robo989]

Hey there's some good pointers here...so when the motherboards sorted again would this be a good idea

 

Have the 4 hitachi drives on the nvraid and then the 2 dm9s on the sil3114, install windows on the 4 hitachi drives in raid0 and then setup the 2 dm9s and put the swap file on them haveing them in raid0 also, and maybe use them for backup etc?

 

I'll try making the stripe size larger as well,

 

try disabling the swap file?

 

change the system cache settings?

 

I dunno although I'm sure all that would help in various ways, but do you think there could be something else actually wrong in software or hardware?

 

thanks again

 

Rob

[Fight Game]

in raid 0 (or any I think), loading data should be a little faster, but saving data should be a little slower. Have you tried turning the virtual memory down to about 128mb-128mb?

[robo989]

Yeah thats my problem, nothing to do with saving...

 

stuff is loading very slowly - sluggish windows.

[Fight Game]

Did you try turning the virtual memory down to 128-128?

How about turning system restore down a little to, I'm not sure if this will have an affect to cause these problems in particular, but I know by default it's like 12%.

Another suggestion is disabling the indexing service.

Try running some benchmarks on them to compare. I know sisoft sandra has like 10 different numbers you can look at for disk performance. Maybe if only 1 or 2 of these are bad, it could narrow down the problem.

[robo989]

I don't use system restore, only have essential services running

 

I will try the setting for virtual memory sounds like a good idea, but I can't until the mobo is fixed

 

cheers for though

[Mondo1287]

Your stripe size is derfinitely a big part of your problem. You may want to read this: http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=1491&p=5

 

And also google for raid stripe size.

[robo989]

Hey thanx mate thats a good read there

 

Its pretty inteeresting (how sad am I), the what sorta stripe size would you recommend, I mean, I just wanna get rid of this laggy feeling so the larger the better, right?