1.5TB RAID5 Highpoint RocketRAID 2322

I'm currently running a Highpoint 2322 external RAID card with an Addonics Mini Storage Tower and 4 500GB Western Digital RE2 hard drives. With all four drives in RAID0 mode I'm getting ~250MB/s bursts, ~170MB/s average read, and ~125MB/s writes. In RAID5 I'm getting similar bursts, but average reads drop to ~70MB/s and write speed drops down to ~50MB/s.

Do these RAID0 speeds look good?

Is such a huge performance hit when going from RAID0 to RAID5 normal?

Here's my hdtach results compared - RAID0 is red and RAID5 is blue.

I myself use a rocket raid 2320 (internet card of I'm assuming the same chipset/such) and running raid 5, I'm getting "similar" results with 8x250 raid 5, so yes.. there is a performance difference between 0/5. It looks to me as if the rocketraid 232x cards do suffer from a lack of high-speed raid 5.

(Though, never tried 0 out on my card, I don't have a place to put 1.2TB of files if I rebuilt the array, plus I don't want to have a chance to loose data)

I do believe that the 2320 is the same chipset.

Any chance you could post an image of the hdtach long bench scores for your array?

You might want to try different sized blocks and run a few tests. I'm sure you can get better performance by using something other than the default size.

Red is 32mb test, blue is 8mb test. Basically the same between the two.

The deciding factor may be the fact my array is 3/4 full. (this is also why it isnt 2 arrays of 4 drive raid 0, cant find a place to hold 1.2TB of data)

I've tried both 64 and 1024k sized chunks and the performance difference is extremely small.

Originally Posted by Tweak Monkey

You might want to try different sized blocks and run a few tests. I'm sure you can get better performance by using something other than the default size.