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RAID 5 Noise

G

GreatestOne

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 15, 2005
Messages
488
Hey guys... I am running a RAID 5 off of 3x400GB Samsung drives, and it seems the hd's are accessing continuously, no breaks... I guess this may seem reasonable considering it is striping and duping, but I just want to make sure it is normal...

Also if it is, should I be worried about any added heat produced... not sure if accessing produces more heat than just spinning... I do have i think a medium fan right in front of the 3 drives, so it should be fine, but just being a little paranoid I guess... thanks!
 
did you just create the array? if so that is normal, raid5 array takes hours to properly initialize. After that you should only see/hear activity when actually accessing the volume.
 
Nope, I had this running for at least 2 months now i think... but i feel the the hd is non-stop... almost makes me paranoid its some malicious spyware working 24/7 on my pc!!!!!!!!!!!
 
Lots more capable.. It will tell you the path the process is accessing (which is the part you'd care about in this case)

Edit: Are you booting off this array? If not, filter by the array path (eg path contains d: )

(in can also do neat things like tell you what is accessing a particular file etc.)
 
I have a ton of instances of:

lsass.exe
avgrsx.exe
csrss.exe
services.exe
firefox.exe
svchost.exe
thunderbird (email)
yahoo (messenger)

and winlogon.exe a few times a page.

Maybe I should shut down one program at a time or start up one at a time to see whats the culprit?
 
You will want to use the filters for sure in Psmon.

You could try just shutting down programs, but some of those lsass and svhost for example are windows processes, so trying to shut them down could be bad.
 
Ya.. well as long as its not spies, I feel a bit better... I better look into more details after filtering, but still, if this continues, I would feel a little disconcerted unless someone tells me this is normal.
 
It's not normal.. Is AVG running a scan? (since you seem to have that AV installed) I know it kicks off automatically and can take forever to finish. I had one friend bring a computer to me for "fixing" that had been slow for ages and it ended up being AVG never finishing a scan because it started over every time he shut down, and was never left on long enough to finish.
 
AVG runs its scan at 5 am scheduled... sometimes i dont let it finish yes, but i have my pc on several hours every day, and i dont see the AVG running in the background, and my pc is not really seeing any performance decrease, which i notice when it is running... so yes it is a bit confusing to me why. Thanks for your help btw....
 
Are you booting off of the array? That would definately have an impact on it, also how much do you download with bit torrent? ;)
 
Yes it is my boot drive, I dont have a separate drive besides the 3... I do quite a bit of bt, but since i download more popular videos, i only have it on for like 5 min before i shut it down. I try to leave all download clients off when not dl'ing...

I had my case on its side for a while bec i had to keep opening it up for various things, and i set it back upright and cleaned the fans out a bit, and i think the sound is a bit less, but i still hear the random access on the hd's fairly consistently, even when i am just like tying this.. its not as continuous as before, but it is still regular.
 
uh booting from raid 5 is slow, its takes a gang of processing to write the parity for files and if you have a lot of random writes from temp files and the swap file its even worse
 
I'm not sure what u mean by slow... my pc boots up on xp pro fairly fast from what I am used to (and i am pretty impatient), and i have a load of things booting up too with it on top of the normal stuff.... so what are you saying, to run a better raid 5 for the rest of my stuff, boot of a single disk or a raid 1 and then have a separate raid 5? Or are you comparing this to a raid 0? I think a raid 5 boot is still faster than a single disk boot from my comparison.

Ideally yes I would love to run a raid 0 boot with 2 x velociraptors and play games off it and use a raid 1 for backups, but thats not viable for me right now so thats why the raid 5, which is supposed to be halfway to both worlds right?
 
RAID 5 is supposed to be fairly quick, I think as quick as a striped RAID when using hardware. Howevery, if you're booting of the RAID 5 it is constantly writing to and from the page file for windows.

How much RAM do you have and what OS are you running?

RAID 5 (from what I know or have heard) is supposed to be quickest with 4 drives as opposed to 3, something about being more efficient. Can anyone elaborate, and explain why if I am correct?
 
I heard RAID 0 is the fastest hands down... not sure if the 4 drives will bring the RAID 5 up to 0 speed, but anyways, I am running 4GB (3.25 viewable) on XP Pro SP4, with a conroe 2.8 oc to 3.2... 8800 GT oc
 
raid speed in regular usage is mostly FUD tbh
most slow downs occur from random access where an SSD would win hands down
but yeah unless youre using a separate raid controller as opposed to a software/built in one, its going to be slower than a single drive writing data
 
If you have Vista, the resource monitor lets you see what % of cpu activity each program is getting, thus causing the thrashing.
 
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