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Slow hardware RAID performance on Win10

F

Flapjack

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Apr 29, 2000
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I'm having an issue with slow transfers that hasn't happened since I upgraded to a "real" hardware RAID card. I have a Sans Digital TR5M-B that came with a crappy little software RAID controller. I ditched it after recommendations from the good folks here and got a RocketRAID 2314. I've had zero issues with it before upgrading to Win10.

The enclosure houses five 2TB Western Digital Red drives. The system has an AMD A10-6800K CPU on a Gigabyte FM2+ motherboard with 8GB of RAM. I haven't changed anything in the array or in the controller card's BIOS for many years.

Basically, I start at 150 MB/s or so when copying from the array to any other drive in the system, then drops down to 8-9 MB/s within about 15 seconds. Originally, I thought it was a USB 3.0 driver issue, since I have an external Seagate 5TB and Western Digital 4TB drive I was trying to copy everything in the array to. I got three new Western Digital 5TB drives that I planned on installing in that enclosure, so I needed to get everything off the old drives. To eliminate the other drives, I copied to/from the USB drives themselves, which should be the slowest of all combos. I get a steady 140-150 MB/s from the Western Digital 4TB external to the Seagate 5TB external. I get roughly the same speeds going from internal spinning disks and SSD. I've already updated every single driver in the system. The newest drivers I can find for the RR 2314 are from 2013 (on their site). I've also enabled all the faster write cache settings on all the drives, as the system is on a beefy battery backup, and a little dataloss wouldn't be the end of the world.

If I can't figure this out, I may just try to find room in the case for the three WD 5TB drives and go to the RAID on the motherboard. Thanks in advance.
 
Not entirely sure why you're experiencing such performance, but I will point out that that RAID card isn't hardware RAID. It would be very similar to what you find integrated into your motherboard.
 
How is it not hardware RAID? It has it's own processor. The only thing offloaded to the CPU are parity calculations.

Check out my original thread from 2010. This card has run that array at very fast speeds for a long time. The slowdown happened with Windows 10.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1524298
 
High Point doesn't list drivers for Win 10 for this controller. My guess is that you are using Windows generic drivers that are incapable of decent transfer speeds. The 3 WD drives should be SATA 6gb so I would suggest a new controller to handle the transfer speeds that the drives are capable of. The onboard raid is also just SATA 3gb so that wouldn't gain you anything as Gigabyte probably doesn't have Win 10 Raid drivers either!
 
The High Point 644L would work almost plug and play for you as it uses same GUI and does have Win 10 drivers as well as it being SATA 6gb transfer speeds.
 
Thanks for the replies. I looked up the 644L, and it looks like basically a 6gb version of the one I have now. Thinking maybe the drivers would be newer, I went to their support page. The inf file shows the latest drivers are actually older than the 2314.... from 2012!

Are there better cards that support RAID5 over eSATA with port multiplication?
 
I just did some more testing, and I'm starting to think this is solely a Windows problem. I connected the three WD drives internally and set them up in a parity storage space array. I can start a copy to it, and it'll run at 130-140 for a gig or two (sometimes less), then drop down to ~35 or so until the transfer is completed. Curious, I rechecked transfers to/from the other drives that were previously normal, and the did the same thing after a good-size portion had been transferred. Ironically, a 2TB transfer from the RR2314 array to a USB 3.0 drive seems to be sitting stable at 95-100 MB/s.

I caught a video of it happening.
https://youtu.be/pvI2ZYehbjs
 
I don't know where you are looking on High Point's web site, but what I saw was the inf file is dated 6/18/2014 and they are stated to run on Win 10, which the others do not! The only reason I suggested the 644L was it uses the same GUI ans it would take advantage of the WD drive's 6gb transfer rate!
 
You can buy an LSI true hardware raid card that would do everything you want but it will cost you more than your computer is worth.
 
jrweis said:
I don't know where you are looking on High Point's web site, but what I saw was the inf file is dated 6/18/2014 and they are stated to run on Win 10, which the others do not! The only reason I suggested the 644L was it uses the same GUI ans it would take advantage of the WD drive's 6gb transfer rate!
Click to expand...
Hmmm, I don't get it. I opened it yesterday and it definitely wasn't 2014. I must've clicked the wrong link. For the price, I guess it's worth a shot. :)
 
So... I'm about to pull the trigger on the 644L, but I still have a few questions:

- Will the 6GB/s even matter if I'm still using the same enclosure, which says it uses "the latest SATA II port multiplier technology". Here is a link to it: http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid/tr5mb.html

- Amazon shows two different pages for the 644L: one for $96, and the other for $70. The model number and picture look exactly the same... both sold by Amazon. I'd love to save $26, but I'm leery.

$70 one:
http://www.amazon.com/HighPoint-Roc...id=1451965667&sr=1-2&keywords=RocketRAID+644L

$96 one:
http://www.amazon.com/HighPoint-Roc...id=1451968825&sr=1-1&keywords=RocketRAID+644L
 
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I learned the hard way that the $70 adapter above was the "Rocket" not the "RocketRAID". An easy enough mistake to make... luckily, Amazon took it back without question.

I'm back up to very nice speeds with the five 5TB WD Blues in RAID5 on the RocketRAID 644L. I still have some Win10 funkiness writing to an SSD, but writing from an SSD (the only thing that will load up the RAID5 array) gets me anywhere from 160-220 MB/s... and that's on a write!

win10_raid5_transfer.jpg
 
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