1.5TB RAID5 Highpoint RocketRAID 2322

[grenadier]

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.

 

[Nacho]

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)

 

[grenadier]

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?

 

[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.

 

[Nacho]

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)

 

[grenadier]

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

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.