software raid windows 2012 performance

[alphabanks]

As of right now I'm using a Windows Server 2012 system with software raid 5 12TB's to serve media content to our TV's. I would like to ask who has experience with software raid in Windows? I would like to know what you are getting in regards to reads and writes. I am pulling about 113MB on reads on writes I am about 88MB to 113MB. The problem I have is how to make the writes more consistent for example if I copy over a 8 gig HD file the file will move at 113MB until it reaches the 6 gig mark after that the speed slows down than it ramps itself backup.

 

[leeleatherwood]

Are you talking about Raw disk performance or SMB (network) performance?

Raw disk performance with 7 Hitachi 5k3000's in a Parity storage pool formated ReFS i am getting 600MB/s reads and 120MB/s writes. (In contrast I have a RAID0 storage pool on those same drives that gets 800MB/s both ways.)
I have all write caching disabled. I am relying on ReFS and my UPS to provide protection from power failure.

If you are talking about the network speed you should get a solid 112MB/s both ways over gigabit but make sure you enable jumbo frames on your nic's and turn your send/receive buffers up to the max they can go.

 

[alphabanks]

First off I am talking about smb. You talked about disabling write caching I was wondering how to enable write caching in order to improve my write performance. Also I have not enabled jumbo frames yet I would also like to test other protocols such as nfs and ftp to see what network speeds I can achieve. BTW when I talk about raid I am speaking of Windows dynamic disk not fake raid on the motherboard.

 

[leeleatherwood]

First off I am talking about smb. You talked about disabling write caching I was wondering how to enable write caching in order to improve my write performance. Also I have not enabled jumbo frames yet I would also like to test other protocols such as nfs and ftp to see what network speeds I can achieve. BTW when I talk about raid I am speaking of Windows dynamic disk not fake raid on the motherboard.

Write caching can help/hurt performance depending on hardware configuration just know that if you disable it you can lose data during a power failure. You can change the settings in the device manager, right click on your drives and choose properties. Then click the policies tab.

You need to first find out where your bottleneck is occurring. If its only over SMB then there is no need to ask any question about Raid or mess with the write caching. You should run some sort of HD benchmark to make sure the drives themselves are performing optimally in order to eliminate that as a variable. Once you find that the drive configuration can do what you are asking you should then start troubleshooting SMB.

For SMB, try to turn on jumbo frame and increase your send/receive buffers. What devices are you using on both ends? Realtek ethernet cards suck balls, try with Intel or Broadcom nics on both ends. I have one computer with a Realtek NIC and it can only transmit at ~86MB/s, whereas the broadcom/intel NICS stay pegged at 112MB/s.

If you are running Windows, I would not encourage NFS. SMB in all of my experience is faster and more reliable once configured properly. If you plan on sharing to Linux machines though I would enable both SMB and NFS, and use the NFS for the linux machines.

Hope that helps.

 

[DJ_Datte]

even a single disk should saturate a normal network 1g connection in this day and age, it's not really a helpful test of performance. Any brand nic on the PCIe bus should also peg to the maximum, we have RealTek (up to 6 years old), Intel, random brands, they all peg at the max (~up to 125mb/sec, or better said, 99.9% of the transfer monitor).