3WARE RAID5 slowness.....

[decoy5657]

here goes. I have a 3ware 9500s 4LP controller. This is supposed to be a high end controller. It cost about 500 bucks by the time I bought the addon battery. I have 3 400GB SATA drives attached to it in a raid 5 config. I chose this setup for future expandability. This controller has live expansion to an additional disk.

Anyway, the card is in a dual xeon 2.0ghz box / windows 2003 / gigabit /1gb ram / PCI-X / the card is pci-x also. If one 100mbit user is transfering files to it, other users who have open files complain of it's slowness. This is especially true with quickbooks users. All other transfers seem to hang up. I've dealt with plenty of RAID5 setups in the past and never had this much trouble. I, of course, have never used a 3ware controller before.

Here are some screenshots.

This is the drive being tested with no other load. Just HD-TACH

I was pulling a 4.5GB file from the array while this test took place.

Here is the performance I had from said file copy.

I have two of the same hard drives in a mirror on my workstation at home. The controller is an el-cheapo promise 2 port card.

I might have to just create two 400 gig mirrors. The speed is crazy slow when more than 1 person is transfer

[nmX.Memnoch]

The 9500S isn't a PCI-X card. It is simply a 64-bit, 66MHz PCI card. I have one of these in my Dell Precision 650 workstation at work with 4 x Seagate 300GB SATA drives, but I'm the only person using it. I also didn't configure the drives in RAID5, I configured them as two RAID1 arrays.

I did originally have them configured as one RAID5 array and then partition them during install. The reason I reconfigured them is that I noticed the same type of slow down when I was working on more than one thing at once (i.e. copying a file to the D: partition while trying to open an application from the C: partition). I didn't quite understand this either as it's supposed to be a high-end SATA controller.

If you want a true PCI-X SATA RAID controller you should go with the 3ware 9550SX. Even 3ware claims it to be "200% faster than the 9500S". Not only is it designed for 133MHz PCI-X operation but it also supports SATA/300 (aka SATA II).

However, you are correct in that the 9500S in a 64-bit PCI slot should have plenty of bandwidth available to it for more than one person to be doing file operations at once. If you have it in a PCI-X slot make sure you aren't forcing that slot to run faster than 66MHz in the BIOS. You could be overheating the card and it just isn't showing until you try to do a lot of file writes (I had this happen with a Dell PERC320 in a PCI-X slot).

Edited February 9, 2006 by nmX.Memnoch

[decoy5657]

Good post. I'll have to wait until tonight to try anything.

thanks

[nmX.Memnoch]

I just noticed that 3ware recently posted the 9.3.0.3 series of driver/firmware/utility. You may want to check out the drive and firmware updates. Also, the 3DM2 utility will give you a windows based management utility that will show you if something is wrong with either the controller or your array. You can even configure it to send email alerts.

Another thing I noticed is that with the 9.3.0.3 series they are turning NCQ off by default. This isn't a bad idea for standard desktop/workstation setups but could definitely hurt performance when being used in a file server. If you already have the 9.3.0.3 series firmware you should look into this. If NCQ is disabled, enable it to see if it makes any difference.

If you're still within your return window I'd still recommend returning the 9500S and replacing it with a 9550SX. There's not much of a cost difference.