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Windows Server 2012 - Raid5 performance

D

Damodred

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 27, 2007
Messages
171
Hello all,

I'm doing some testing with a Windows Server 2012 and was looking at performance comparisons. Over time the system has used three different OS: FreeNas, Windows 8 with Storage Spaces and now Windows Server 2012 with its built in raid5.

To start with, the hardware is quite dated:

AMD Phenom II 940, quad core 3,0ghz
8gb RAM
500gb system disk
8x2TB for storage
Filesystem for Server 2012 is ReFS

Now, with FreeNas and Raidz2 it was easy to saturate a gbit connection. With Storage spaces and parity (one drive) I get around 25-30MB/sec and with Raid5 I was hoping to get something in between.

So here is the results:

With files smaller than 1,8gb I go well over what a gigabit connection allow. However, as soon as I try to move a larger file the system halts completely. The first 1,8gb transfers in seconds and then it is as if a cache somewhere goes full. Transfer rates goes down to 5-8MB/secs and sometimes even a full stop. Pressing pause in the file transfer window and then restart it after a few seconds brings the speed up to 100-120MB again which makes me believe that it has to do with a full cache.

Are there any settings to toy around with? I wouldn't mind limit my transfer rates to say 50-60MB/sec or add in another single hdd as cache. I would also like to know if Windows somehow can report which disk is failing (with serial number if possible) instead of just saying "Disk7 is missing".

Please note that this is for pure testing purposes and for me to study the systems and eventually learning something from it. Its not meant to be in a live enviroment or used, a full format is more or less expected somewhere down the road :)

Thanks in advance!
 
This is a pretty know issue with regards to parity in Server 2012 (R2). There are many blog posts about how terrible their parity performance is. I've never seen anyone mention a fix to this and I'm not sure there is one until Microsoft comes up with a solution.

However, the Mirror 2x and 3x do offer very good performance, even better than hardware raid according to some whitepapers.

idk about the serial number thing.
 
It is? What a pity :( One would think that with the performance from Linux and FreeNas there should be a profitable idea to fix this.
 
Then it would be much easier and probably cheaper to get a decent controller card seeing as it requires three SSDs to work with dual parity. Doesnt look that cost effective to me I'm afraid.
 
Gui, never been much of a fan of consoles or command lines for some reasons.

Decided to skip the whole thing with software raid and also storage spaces, performance not up to expectations. Works fine for most of the time but fails at the more critical, for example when a disk is missing it just says so, not letting me know which.
 
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