clubhouse

Indeed, I thought the RAID5 results would look great, but I was a bit badly surprised. Apart from the Access Time that is still very low, the other figures are surprising to me. Should I blame the ARA? or HDTune?

Anyway, I managed to hook up an old hard drive and I am right now running a new set of read/write tests with the RAID volume being unpartitioned. I will post them as soon as I am done with all RAID10 and RAID5

briarbiz

Rampage:
Yeah, I have a Dimension 9200, I was thinking in that direction too. I'll give it a shot... thanks.

gmitch64

I have the same issue on my board too.... Seems to be working fine in Windows tho... Hopefully this weekend I'll get linux installed on the box and see how it performs.


G

ounderfla69

You can see the card in Windows, have you tried to install Megaraid manager? There is a setting the bios that allows you to no boot on the card. Is your card new or used? Maybe it could have been set to no boot. I was going to try but I dont know how to set it back after I do it.

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Bonz™

Ok so I added a 1TB to my 5x1TB RAID5. It took about 48 hours to add it, and now it's been background initializing for about 15 hours and is 55% done. I would think that after it was done rebuilding the array that I can see the extra 1TB of space... but it's still showing 3.63TB instead of 4.55TB. Do I have to wait for it to finish initializing? I wouldn't think so... anyone know?

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Bonz::Asmodian Templar of Zikel

Total Available Storage
Currently: 8,377 GB (useable)

clubhouse

OK folks... after 24 hours of running tests, here are the results! Surprisingly, they are very different from what I ran before, as this time I used a separate hard drive to run HDTune from. The RAID volume was unpartitioned for each test, so I was also able to run write tests.

Not so surprisingly, RAID5 beats RAID10 indeed, as suggested by RobiNet previously. But now I am a bit confused... Should I really go with RAID5 and a strip size of 128k for a workstation that I will use for standard office work, running Vista x64? Any suggestions welcome...

EDIT: I attached all the results screenshots from HDTune, as well as a results.zip containing the Excel file with all tables and charts.

Please note that I was not able to run write tests at 32k block size, as HDTune was crashing

Comments welcome!

Attached Files

	results_screenshots.zip (3.00 MB, 25 views)
	results.zip (24.0 KB, 16 views)

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My benchmarks for different RAID5 and RAID10 configs on my system: read | write

the_beast

Looking at your results, I think I would go with RAID5, 64k stripe. If I remember correctly, larger stripe sizes almost always bench higher, so that is probably why the 128k looks tempting. I think the smaller size would be better for OS use though.

If HDTune crashes with 32k stripes, I wouldn't use that size just in case it is crashing due to a firmware bug or conflict on the card.

clubhouse

Well, RAID5-64k looks almost as good as RAID5-128k in write results, if not better with 128k blocks. Also, it's not that far behind it in read results... So indeed I was wondering if I should go with RAID5-64k. It could be the best compromise, even though I was initially convinced RAID10 would be much better. Oh well, I'll gain another 300 Gb with RAID5, so I won't complain

Well, HDTune was crashing when I tried to run write tests with a benchmarck block size of 32k, and that was for all different RAID configurations. So I ran write tests only with block sizes from 64k to 512k

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My benchmarks for different RAID5 and RAID10 configs on my system: read | write

mrwilby

Hey all.

Great thread. I am about to pull the trigger on a couple of these, but wondered if somebody who owns one already could answer a few questions:

1) Does the card support any kind of configurable (or otherwise) spin up delay so that you can e.g. batch boot 4 drives at a time in order to reduce stress on the PSU?

2) If I want, can I skip all the RAID functionality and just use the card as an HBA for JBOD, perhaps under e.g. linux (sw raid5/6) or solaris (sw raidz)?

Thanks!

DJZeratul

I am not sure about staggered spin up.

But why on earth would you want to use software raid 5 when this card does hardware raid 5?

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