If you are unlucky enough to have a software raid running on your linux server, youve probably noticed the occasional slowing down of the system. Now, a few days later, my system is resynching, but it is much, much slower. Software raid tends to be slower than hardware raid. It boots up into windows as fast as usual and goes slow after in windows for a few seconds. And if i can have hardware raid, isnt it better to use it instead of jbod and have a software raid.
Your question says software raid is slowing your server, but your question doesnt mention that your server is slow or performing poorly. And my test werent on bare hardware, not on virtualisation. I know its soft raid, rather than hardware accelerated raid, but i would have expected the performance to be significantly better than it is i have a nas here with. The server has two 1tb disks, in a software raid1 array, using mdadm. Sms current h11sslnc offers the lsi3008 raid chip that supports up to 8 drives for your os raid. Raid redundant array of inexpensive disks or drives, or redundant array of independent disks is a data storage virtualization technology that combines multiple physical disk drive components into one or more logical units for the purposes of data redundancy, performance improvement, or both. Premium content you need an expert office subscription to comment. Really though even the larger ones arent much faster. On the software raid side you can try to take turns, kicking one disk out of the array, and then benchmark the raid. Components in your hardware raid box may be top of line when you buy them but technology improves fast. If you dont wait for the array to sync after creating the mirror, you will see results like this.
I have configured 2 western digital red 6tb as raid1 on the lsi embedded megaraid controller and everything seemed to work fine. What would be the good format to have on a raid then. Sure enough, no enterprise storage vendor now recommends raid 5. Software raid, in my experience, is nice for useful redundancy. Advertised speeds arent always the same as real world speeds. I have recently noticed that write speed to the raid array is very slow. Im having an issue with slow transfers that hasnt happened since i upgraded to a real hardware raid card.
I am running windows 7 pro x64, and have set up software raid using two 1 tb hard drives. You might run your benchmark software on one of the drives out of a raid array to see what speeds you get. I read that this model comes with software raid courtesy of intel rapid storage technology, from what i researched software raid is not as good as hardware raid so we are planning of buying a hardware raid contr. A year with nvme raid 0 in a real world setup eteknix. The raid perfomance is quite good but my ssd speeds are slow. Those speeds you listed sound normal for many smaller or older 7. Ive just finished setting up a raid 1 on my system. In software raid it is running on the system processor.
Mirroring is writing data to two or more hard drive disks hdds at the same time if one disk fails, the mirror image preserves the data from the failed disk. Slow write speed corrected by ssd recondition operation. Software raid check slow system issues alt it consulting. Write speed in raid 1 is equal to the write speed of just one of the drives, and reads will be roughly double the speed of one of them. Its all logical, vs a card that has its own processing power, bandwidth, bus etc. Software raid check slow system issues this is an issue that we, as an it services company, run into quite frequently. It only takes a moments reflection to realize that the system processor is almost always faster and more powerful than a dedicated processor. Amd amd motherboards raid0 gen4 array very slow forum jump. During the night when a large amount of data is merged into the database the web application almost stopped working because simple insert operations like adding a log entry took 20 seconds or more.
While the intel raid controller blows the software raid out of the water on sequential reads, surprisingly the windows software raid was better in nearly every other respect. Yes, a hw controller will detect minor failures and disks slowdowns which will slow down the sw raid until there are smart errors in the logs or the operator notices slowness, even random rebuilds, but, in general, if setup right, should be as safe as a hw one, barring the card failure. In hardware raid it is running on a dedicated processor. In the order of 12mbs order of magnitude more info below. Whether software raid vs hardware raid is the one for you depends on what you need to do and how much you want to pay. Three years ago i warned that raid 5 would stop working in 2009. This is particularly useful with ms windows which has a painfully slow implementation of software raid. How to set up software raid 0 for windows and linux pc gamer. To get a speed benefit, you need to have two separate read operations running in parallel. To check if there was something wrong with the drives, i created a six drive raid 0 array and got speeds of 1145mbs write and read. We switched from a hardware raid to a intel software system, and i havent been able to use clonezilla since instead i have to use ghost, and its painfully slow thanks for any feedback. Striped raid combines several hard drives into one by storing consecutive blocks on the next hard drive in the array. Home featured a year with nvme raid 0 in a real world setup. Their website only mentions sas with the 3008 but i did inquire with sms tech support with regards to sata support and was informed it is supported and that 2 logical drives can be created i generally build 1 or 2 raid 10 drives of 4 disks each.
Its also possible that the bus connecting your sata3 controller to the rest of the system is the bottleneck. Wd, seagate and toshiba found selling slow smr drives. After 6 hours of testing i still could not find the problem. Reading a single large file will never be faster with raid 1.
When i started copying data from my old server i noticed a very slow transfer rate maxing out. There is no comparison in performance, in my experience, in software vs hardware raid. Mac pro 5,1 extremely slow mojave raid0 macrumors forums. It seems that no matter if you use a hardware or a software raid controller, you should expect to lose performance when youre duplicating every write, which makes sense. Slow write to raid 5 the problem is that hp, unlike certain other competing vendors, does not allow you to enable the raid controller write cache without the battery kit installed. I have checked a few things, cpu utilisation is not abnormal software raid on a server that already has very high cpu usage, you may experience slower than normal performance, but in most cases there is nothing wrong with using mdadm to create software raids. Storage repository on software raid although citrix recommends against using software raid with xenserver due to performance issues, ive had some pretty awful experiences with hardware raid cards over the last few years. So, really, the customer does not have a choice, other than to choose a new vendor, or pay extra for a. I am needing a bit of help with a server poweredge t30 my bosses bought. Hey people i have recently migrated my file server over to a hp microserver.
Debian squeeze is installed on a separate 10k rpm drive. Software raid hands this off to the servers own cpu. Hardware raid continues to offer solid and simple architectural solutions for combining multiple drives into raid arrays and presenting them to the os as a single device. This is because of periodic redundancy checks of md devices. Raid 10, which used a combination of raid 0 which uses raid stripe storage and raid 1 which uses mirroring can offer significant increases in ssd performance, but it is less storage efficient than raid 0, and the performance gains are about half as great. Windows 8 comes with everything you need to use software raid, while the linux package. Slow write to raid 5 hewlett packard enterprise community. Testing 1 ssd, installing windows 10 and making a benchmark, again on samsung magican, the performances are very high. The server has two 1tb disks, in a software raid1 array, using. Software raid extremely slow kills processor resource.
Alt it consulting software raid check slow system issues. Wd, seagate and toshiba found selling slow smr drives unsuitable for nas raid environments several buyers faced raid rebuilding issues after falling victim to misleading user documentation and. If they perform around the same then youve got a deeper problem. Why is my raid set so slow compared to a single drive. It is a cronjob that runs weekly and scans the md devices for consistency. The drives need to be in sync to have a real measure of performance.
When i migrated simply moved the mirrored disks over, from the old server ubuntu 9. Intel raid 5 poor write performance what fixed mine. At that speed my system cant cope with the video feeds im sending to it. It has a chipset for assisting raid calculations and data transfer, so it gets much better speeds than most onboard software garbage does. Depending on your budget, get a controller that has a large cache 1gb to 4gb and battery backup. Now obviously this is not optimal performance to say the least. Everything ive read about software raid over the years has been less than positive, i. However, make sure you install the os with the raid drivers, or youre going to have problems if you switch from ahci to raid all of a sudden. If you are using a very old cpu, or are trying to run software raid on a server that already has very high cpu usage, you may experience slower than normal performance, but in most cases there is nothing wrong with using mdadm to create software raids. Reassemble, sync, and repeat with the other member. Btw raid 5 i do think that going software raid 5 was a bad choice, i should have gone with 2 3tb drives in raid 1 on the other hand the drive mostly deals with media so speed is not the biggest factor here.
I assume it will get even slower towards the end of the process. Beyond the added boot time, there shouldnt be any negative effect. Software raid extremely slow kills processor resource an i3 is massive overkill just for mdadm. Understanding raid performance at various levels storagecraft. Slow performance with a s jump to solution hi, just taken delivery of a poweredge r630 which has a perc s raid card with 4250gb 7200 rpm sata disks in a raid5 array and were experiencing unexpected slow performance. It takes about three minutes between the time i select ubuntu from grub and the time i get to the login screen.
For raid, youll get a separate ui on boot and it will slow down the boot speed of your system, usually quite significantly. It explains the different settings in proc that can. Speed up linux software raid building and resyncing. Many servers running in small businesses do not have a hardware raid installed, so we are stuck dealing with speed issues like that. Can someone please help me find and fixing the issue. Are there any plans, or is it possible to get clonezilla to recognize a software raid 1 installation. I have a sans digital tr5mb that came with a crappy little software raid controller. As the comments on my recent post apples new kickbutt file system showed, some folks cant believe that software raid could be faster than a modern hardware raid system. Is it normal for windows software raid mirroring to slow a drives. Creating a software raid array in operating system software is the easiest way to go. Does lsi require some kind of configuration setting im unaware of. Speed up linux software raid various command line tips to increase the speed of linux software raid 015610 reconstruction and rebuild time.
Software raid how to optimize software raid on linux. It wont get you insane speeds like a 100% hardware raid top of the line controller, but it will make it very tolerable for you. Command to see what scheduler is being used for disks. I heard the raid card making single, long beeps, usually during shut down.
So i deleted that raid set and again made and raid 5. Unfortunately, the random write performance of the software raid 1 with ssds was very poor. I ditched it after recommendations from the good folks here and got a rocketraid 2314. This was in contrast to the previous concept of highly reliable mainframe disk drives referred to as. I did not want break raid so i dont have individual benchmarks but considering the health reports where fine i doubt that was the problem. With softraids software raid system, you can be assured of always having the best and most current software controlling your raid system. I tried building a raid0 software raid in windows 10 through storage spaces but that wont work. Hardware raid will cost more, but it will also be free of software raid s. Hi, im not a total newbie, but not very experienced also have enjoyed ubuntu. The problem is that, in spite of your intuition, linux software raid 1 does not use both drives for a single read operation. Everything seems to be okay, but i have a very slow boot time. Since some processing power is taken by the software, read and write.