ICH9R RAID5 - who dunnit ?

[somedude]

As the topic says - anybody did a RAID5 setup on an ICH9R chipset? What kind of performance did you get?

I just built a new system with 3 X Seagate 7200.11 1TB drives (with updated firmware ), and things look good so far.

Currently copying data across from an old 300GB SATA drive to the array @ just under 50MB/Sec, which I'm taking to be the read limit for the older drive. Will do some read/write benchmarks as soon as the copying process is completed.

 

[somedude]

I did some testing...
RAID5 : good read speed (160MB/sec), with write speeds topping out at 80MB/sec - slightly slower than a single drive. I guess the ICH9R is just not beefy enough to handle the parity calculations. The system also gets sluggish when trying to do anything while a large copy operation is in progress.

After some reading, I also played with a RAID10 configuration (stiped and mirrored). Here I get 173MB/sec write (average), and 161MB/sec write, and the system stays responsive.

So 10 requires an extra 1TB drive, but it pays off. Guess which RAID level I'm going with

Some good reading here if anybody's interested : http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/eserver/v1r2/index.jsp?topic=/diricinfo/fqy0_cselraid.html

 

[Neo_X]

Sounds interesting.

I are currently struggling along with a software based RAID-5, and *cough*, performance is rather crap((<30MB/s).

This chipset you are talking about, is it a MB, or an add-on card?
I am looing into an add-on PCI-E card, but the 12-port variety(current number of drives i have), is rather expensive. cheapest i have seen so far is $450, but then i dont know the performance i will get.

 

[somedude]

It's onboard on a Giga-Byte P35C-DS3R mobo, but...

I'm not so happy anymore... Put some data on the volume, and the perfomance goes for a ball of sheise... Read / write values are all over the show (min 20MB, max 227MB), whereas on an empty array, it was very consistent, with the normal drop-off as you near the inner sectors of the drive.

I've tried different Intel Matrix storage drivers versions, differennt OS flavours, 32bit, 64 bit - it seems there is no consistency to this lot. I guess if you want to play with RAID, you have to spend the bucks on a decent dedicated controller.

As throughput consistency is more imprtant to me than raw speed, I guess it's goodbye to RAID on the cheap side - another 3grand for a controller seems like a waste when a single drive's throughput meets my needs.