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Dell Raid 5 Questions

M

Moosh

Gawd
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Dec 10, 2000
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Hey guys! I just picked up an old Dell Precision 610 workstation that wasn't being used. It has dual Pentium II Xeon processors, 512 megs of ECC ram, and four hardrives. Three of the hardrives are 9.1 gigabyte Seagate Cheetah 10k rpm drives and one of them is a 9.1 gigabyte Quantum 10k rpm drive. I updated the motherboard to the latest bios. It took me a while to figure out how this old system works. It has an SCSI Ultra 2 160 setup with an Adaptec Raid 5 addon card. The latest drivers they made for this SCSI setup was for Windows 2000, and it luckily worked with Windows 2003 Server. I setup the four SCSI drives in RAID 5 and installed Windows 2003. Sisoft Sandra reports that I am getting about 20 megabytes per second out of the Raid 5 setup. Does this sound correct for the specifications I have listed?

The main point of this thread was to ask if it would make a noticable difference in performance if I upgraded the ram on the Raid 5 card. Currently it has a 16 Meg EDO dimm installed. It can be upgraded to 64 megs. I just wanted to know if it would make any noticable difference for my four drive raid setup.

Finally the last thing I wanted to ask is this. The workstation has all four drives hooked up to the same ribbon cable. Would this be a source of bottle neck?

Thanks guys! :)
 
Thanks! The stripe size is 64 kilobytes. Its running Windows 2003 Small Business Server. Its role is for Active Directory, downloading torrents, Sharepoint, and some other things I want to learn that I don't know off the top of my head.
 
for it being old scsi drives on an old RAID controller, that sounds about right.
Are you booting from this array?
You'll see a pretty good speed increase if you go to 2 x RAID1 arrays, or a single RAID 0+1 using all the drives.
I try to stay away from booting from RAID 5 as it can be much slower. Move your pagefile to a different array if you can.
 
My goal is to have all four drives contributing towards the C: system drive, because they are all so small.

So having all four drives in a Raid0+1 setup would be optimal for speed? 16 gigabytes of space is plenty for my system drive. I will add some IDE drives for storage, just looking to get the most speed possible setup and redudency out of the 4 SCSI drives.

So Raid0+1 is what you guys would recommend for top speed with this setup? Thanks!!! :)
 
If it's just for testing, you could do a RAID 1 boot and a RAID 0 'data', if the card allows creating multiple arrays.
Either RAID 1 or 0 is going to be faster than 5 for pretty much everything, and RAID 1 would be the fastest 'safe' array you could do.
If you're just messing around with it, go for a 4 drive RAID 0 array :)
Adding more cache will only really help if you're doing RAID 5, and the older Adaptec cards didn't always do R5 very quickly.
I would also upgrade the card's BIOS/Firmware when you recreate the array

Bryn Mawr huh? I work out in Malvern.
 
Cool. I am using this box for active directory, as well as testing and learning other things so I do want it to be backed up. I will do Raid 0 + 1 on the four drives, two striped two backup.

I am not sure there was a bios update for the Adaptec 1130 Raid addon card.

Yep I live in Bryn Mawr. Are you an IT admin for your job?
 
Hey guys, is it a known fact that Raid 5 is always slower than Raid 0/1 ? I just reinstalled windows 2003 and switched to Raid 0/1 and it still gives me 20 mb/s on sisoft sandra.

Is it possible that sanda does not test the area where Raid 0/1 is faster? Thanks. I wish I used a different program for comparison's sake when I had raid 5 running.
 
Moosh said:
Hey guys, is it a known fact that Raid 5 is always slower than Raid 0/1 ? I just reinstalled windows 2003 and switched to Raid 0/1 and it still gives me 20 mb/s on sisoft sandra.
Click to expand...

It should always be slower on writes. I do not know how Sandra compiles its final score, but it does show you the different statistics in the info pane.
 
Zuht said:
I do not know how Sandra compiles its final score,.
Click to expand...

it flips a coin :p
dont use Sandra for filesystem benchmarks period (see link above)

a good filesystem benchmark is IOZone as it actually shows you the assorted variables (once you graph it)
 
Thanks for teaching me a thing or two guys. :) I have it setup in Raid 0+1. I formated it a few times before I got the most of it. :p
 
RAID5 takes a big performance hit for write operations. The memory on the card is used to hide that performance hit from you (write-back cache). If you're frequently writing new files which are very large (larger than the cache), then more memory would help. If you're writing files which are even bigger than the maxed out cache then it won't help too much.

RAID 0+1 is as fast as you can get with redundancy.
 
Cool thanks. Raid 0+1 I assume will not benefit if I upgrade from 16 megs of ram to more?
 
Moosh said:
Yep I live in Bryn Mawr. Are you an IT admin for your job?
Click to expand...
Heh, that's one of my titles. Depends on the day :) I'm officially the 'Network and WAN Administrator'
I assume will not benefit if I upgrade from 16 megs of ram to more?
Click to expand...
I don't *think* it will make much of a difference based on things i've read on other forums.
 
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