RAID Benchmark Help Please!

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nachofine

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Hi,

We have a physical server running at an ISP, It has RAID 5 Intel BIOS Raid, running 3 x Seagate Exos 7E2
The server is slow when installing apps etc...

I queried with them to check the drive config.
We ran a drive benchmark and we get the below results. They say that these results are acceptable for this server and drives config.
It doesn't seem write to me. Does anyone have any information as to whether this is normal...or not.
THANKS!!!!
717944
 
Thats dog slow but you are running mechanical disks so assuming no additional optimizations that seems just about right and also remember RAID5 read/write is not the same as Raid1 or Raid10, you dont get redundancy and roughly equal speed boost out of it. RAID5 should really not be used if speed is a concern. If you are going to do traditional RAID with redundancy then use Raid1 or Raid10 depending on budget. Raid5/6 is really waste of performance.

What board is it assuming its using the default onboard raid controller or if its a addon mini-pcix addon raid card do you know the model name ?

If you are stuck with with mechanical disks and able to redo the server I would suggest to bypass the raid controller entirely and run straight JBOD then install zfs and if you have plenty of ran use about 25% of system ram available for caching and add a tiny SSD for additional caching partition.

This helps you save money by not using SSD for all disks but still getting decent performance boost on data that is accessed often even with mechanical slow disks.
 
Not sure the board, ISP says its intel Raid (assuming on the mb/bios)
The server was provided by the ISP as is. I understand that it might be slower. My argument with them is that the write speeds are almost non existent.. I run the same benchmark on a 10 year old desktop pc, and i get better results. Surely there is something wrong or do you think that those speeds are normal?? Surely not? It took 18 mins to run this benchmark and 4 Minutes on a pc. Below is pc benchmark717968
 
nachofine said:
Not sure the board, ISP says its intel Raid (assuming on the mb/bios)
The server was provided by the ISP as is. I understand that it might be slower. My argument with them is that the write speeds are almost non existent.. I run the same benchmark on a 10 year old desktop pc, and i get better results. Surely there is something wrong or do you think that those speeds are normal?? Surely not?
Click to expand...

It is still mechanical disks in Raid5, you will get redundancy but a loss of read/write performance in most cases cause you will theoretically get about 50-60% the overall performance of the slowest disk in the raid5 configuration. So without knowing exactly if even all the disks in your setup is exact same make/model/specs that could also be a factor in drop in performance.

Your only solution when dealing with full dedicated server is to select the parts , install the OS yourself and making sure all the disks are in fact the same make and model.

What OS are you running for this dedicated server ? There is of course a small chance that the performance drop off is related to driver issues.

But just so you are aware the 64K to 1MB speed is pretty much normal for those mechanical disks.. below 64k and above 1MB you will always see drop off in performance depending on what the sector configuration is used in the partitioning.
 
See, i edited the above post with pics. I understand will be slow at the low end..
We are running Windows server on there. To me it doesn't make sense that a really old pc at that end has a benmark 100x higher speeds. From what i understand is all the disks are identical! 3 x Seagate Exos 7E2
 
nachofine said:
See, i edited the above post with pics. I understand will be slow at the low end..
We are running Windows server on there. To me it doesn't make sense that a really old pc at that end has a benmark 100x higher speeds. From what i understand is all the disks are identical! 3 x Seagate Exos 7E2
Click to expand...

Right I agree there is something wrong.

The main factors would be.

1. Is it in fact 3x exact identical disks ?
2. What sectoring were the disks partitioned as ?
3. Does the onboard raid controller have any caching ?
4. Which onboard raid controller is being used, its possible it might be specific to the raid controller used and dodgy driver for windows 2016.


Depending on the ISP they may or may not be bothered to answer these questions so the sad truth is that when you go dedicated server and you want reliable performance and know exactly what you bought it is best to go for custom selection of hardware where you manage it entirely from start to finish.

These prebuild managed offerings such as the one I suspect you signed up for I don't really trust the provider to not cut corners or even be bothered to configure it optimally.

Before I forget, also there could be a issue with the controller that it is not using SATA3 but running at SATA1 or something stupidly slow. I don't have access to your server so the things I could check in just few minutes is not something I can do on a forum. :P
 
This is what i was given from the ISP:

Each drive being Seagate Exos 7E2
with RAID 5, and 128KB striping.

this seems to be the controller:
Intel(R) C600+/C220+ series chipset SATA RAID Controller


Not sure about any caching.
 
nachofine said:
This is what i was given from the ISP:

Each drive being Seagate Exos 7E2
with RAID 5, and 128KB striping.

this seems to be the controller:
Intel(R) C600+/C220+ series chipset SATA RAID Controller


Not sure about any caching.
Click to expand...

I think since its a managed solution you will just keep running in circles with them and just drive yourself nuts.

Depending where you need hosting I can give you well priced self managed(you pick the parts) hosting provider that doesn't screw around with you. There is also managed option where they actually do a proper configuration without these issues.
 
John Tempus said:
I think since its a managed solution you will just keep running in circles with them and just drive yourself nuts.

Depending where you need hosting I can give you well priced self managed(you pick the parts) hosting provider that doesn't screw around with you. There is also managed option where they actually do a proper configuration without these issues.
Click to expand...
Unforutnately client isn't going to move, We just want to resolve this with ISP, as they say that this perfomance is normal/optimal. To me it doesn't make sense and we are trying to ascertain whether this performance is normal..or not
 
nachofine said:
Unforutnately client isn't going to move, We just want to resolve this with ISP, as they say that this perfomance is normal/optimal. To me it doesn't make sense and we are trying to ascertain whether this performance is normal..or not
Click to expand...

Knowing the industry you will spend weeks or months to get any sort of solution.

That write performance is definitely not normal, anyone with half a brain could see that and if the ISP says that is normal they are just giving you cold shoulder. Definitely should advise client to move from them or he shouldn't complain about the bad performance because you only resolve these types of issues by moving.

You could attempt to look at the windows 2016 controller drivers and just maybe by some magic updating it or reinstalling it could resolve the issue.

RAID5 performance that you should be seeing on write speed is Single disk write speed / number of disks in raid5 setup = random write speed. So in theory with 3 disks you should at least see something in the area of 30-50MB/s random write and not sub 1MB/s.

RAID5 write speed is really horrible even under ideal circumstances.
 
Curious what the disk activity looks like from performance monitor.. I see you ran the benchmark on the c drive and assume that there was absolutely no other writes happening on the c drive other than whatever windows may be doing in the background when you ran the benchmark..?
 
nachofine said:
It looks like its Intel on Board raid controller. I understand terrible, but really as bad as that !!!
Click to expand...

It could be that one of the drives is failing or has an issue. Is it possible to get a health check on each of the drives? If all are fine then I'd suggest confirming the raid setup in the bios if it's software raid particularly paying attention to the advanced properties read/write policies. For RAID 5 a stripe size of 64kb is preferable.
 
WAslayer said:
Curious what the disk activity looks like from performance monitor.. I see you ran the benchmark on the c drive and assume that there was absolutely no other writes happening on the c drive other than whatever windows may be doing in the background when you ran the benchmark..?
Click to expand...
i have checked.. there is not much going on with the drives
 
John Tempus said:
Knowing the industry you will spend weeks or months to get any sort of solution.

That write performance is definitely not normal, anyone with half a brain could see that and if the ISP says that is normal they are just giving you cold shoulder. Definitely should advise client to move from them or he shouldn't complain about the bad performance because you only resolve these types of issues by moving.

You could attempt to look at the windows 2016 controller drivers and just maybe by some magic updating it or reinstalling it could resolve the issue.

RAID5 performance that you should be seeing on write speed is Single disk write speed / number of disks in raid5 setup = random write speed. So in theory with 3 disks you should at least see something in the area of 30-50MB/s random write and not sub 1MB/s.

RAID5 write speed is really horrible even under ideal circumstances.
Click to expand...

I am not trying to fix the problem. I just need to know if anyone thinks that the speeds reflected are normal/optimal for the config as stated by the ISP I need some sort of argument.

It's running an Intel Xeon 3.5 Ghz with 32GB Memory,

Where would I check for the SATA type.. i only have access remotely
 
nachofine said:
I am not trying to fix the problem. I just need to know if anyone thinks that the speeds reflected are normal/optimal for the config as stated by the ISP I need some sort of argument.

It's running an Intel Xeon 3.5 Ghz with 32GB Memory,

Where would I check for the SATA type.. i only have access remotely
Click to expand...

Those write speeds at less than 1MB/s nevermind the very bottom few KB/s is not normal. So whatever is causing the issue either with the sector configuration of 128K could be the leading cause.

Whatever the main reason might be this setup would probably need a reconfiguration properly with correct sector size and possible need raid controller bios update.

So in short, those lower and upper write speeds are pathetic and not as it should be.

This is why I told you straight away that if the ISP looking at those numbers reply that it is normal then you should immediately plan to move away from them. They are clearly useless and have no idea what they are talking about and just want you to stop bugging them.
 
nachofine said:
I just need to know if anyone thinks that the speeds reflected are normal/optimal for the config as stated by the ISP I need some sort of argument.
Click to expand...

I know jack about raid but willing to bet money that cant be normal, hell writing to a fongkong usb2 stick is faster than that.
 
I came here hoping to read about your WOW raid accomplishments. leaves disappointed...
 
One or more of the drives could be failing, load up crystal disk info and it will show you the status and possibly the SATA interface type.
 
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