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Windows 10 Issues
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Using Softraid for Windows 3.0.14.16 and setup a 6 drive raid 5 with 10TB Hitachi Ultrastar SATA disks. Made the stripe 64k and I believe everything is set correctly but getting very inconsistent writes to the array. When copying data from a fast NVMe the copy starts off very fast then flatlines to 3mb per second or less, then it begins to recover to around 120 or so then goes back down. Reads are always fast 1.2gb per second.
Is this the expected behavior? Why does the speed change so much? Just as a test making the disk raid 0 I am seeing 900mb per second writes.
This topic was modified 3 years ago by MacBits
Posted : 28/12/2022 12:23 pm
Apparently tech support is already communicating with you.
I think they are waiting for technical support information from you.
thanks!
Posted : 29/12/2022 11:46 am
I've been playing out with a new dell R515 server here with a H700 controller that has 1GB cache. The RAID10 container with 4x 600GB 15K RPM works quite well, and on the same controller I've a 5x2TB raid 5 array. I know the disks are nearline SAS and bla bla bla, but I'm not getting any better than 45MB/sec doing sequencial writes on it. I've been playing with write cache inside the Windows 2008R2 guest and made some differences so sometimes without write cache enabled on the OS the writes goes for some time at 100MB/sec, sometimes until the cache flushes completely but sometimes it goes for quite a long time, like 1 minute or more than again drops to 40-45MB/sec.
Posted : 26/01/2023 6:29 am
It is a constant problem, the performance briefly goes up when the cache empties and get full again, during this period the write speeds saturage gbit speeds bit still a few seconds later the cache flushes and performance back again to 45MB sec. The battery is in good condition, the server is a brand new Dell R515, has 3 weeks of life and I can see on the hardware tab the raid controller is not doing any sync or anything else, all green including the battery backed cache.
Posted : 26/01/2023 6:30 am
This is a hardware RAID you are querying about?
Shouldn't you go to Dell for support?
Posted : 26/01/2023 12:03 pm
Good morning, I have a problem similar to the one described by MacBits. Was it solved for him? If so, how? Is it better to open a ticket?
Posted : 07/04/2023 4:39 am
Guys, I've partially solved the issue. I have a Sabrent container with 10 disks connected via USB-C Gen2 10Gbit. If I create a RAID5 with only 5 disks and reformat the newly created disk by changing the allocation unit size from Windows (I tried with 1024 kbytes), everything seems to run smoothly. However, if I do the same thing by creating a RAID5 with all 10 disks, the system runs slowly. And if I don't reformat from Windows, the system still runs slowly even with only 5 disks.
Posted : 07/04/2023 10:10 am
Passed on to the main developer. If I hear back something useful, I will post.
Posted : 07/04/2023 1:24 pm
Update: conducted a simulation test of a disk failure. It took 5 days to rebuild the RAID5 and I would say that's definitely too long. Once rebuilt, the performance is excellent if the steps I mentioned in the previous post have been taken beforehand.
Posted : 12/04/2023 4:14 am
Second update: performed further testing with a Sabrent container holding 5 disks connected via USB-C Gen2 10Gbit. If I create a RAID5 with 5 disks and reformat the newly created disk by changing the allocation unit size to 64KB using Windows, I get stable performance between 600-700 MB/s. After approximately 20 minutes, the speed suddenly drops to 160 MB/s. If I change the allocation unit size to 256KB, I get stable performance between 600-650 MB/s for the first 30 minutes or so, then it levels off at around 500-550 MB/s. If I format with an allocation unit size of 16KB, writing starts at 500 MB/s but then drops to 160 MB/s after about 20 seconds. I conclude that in order to achieve good performance, I need to have the allocation unit size set to at least 256KB. It would be interesting to be able to assign these values directly in SoftRaid when creating the RAID.
Posted : 12/04/2023 6:26 am
What brand drives are these?
This does not seem normal. Can you create a support ticket? You can go to softRAID.com/support
Then run the Windows Diagnostic program with the drives connected. You can download it here: https://download.owc.com/diagnostics/windows
This should generate a .ZIP file - When you get a response, reply with the zip file and any other descriptive information that can help them (copy/paste this post).
Posted : 12/04/2023 4:04 pm
The hard disks are Seagate Exos X16, specifically the model ST16000NM001G. I have opened a ticket and am waiting for their response, in the meantime I have generated the diagnostic .zip file.
Thank you.
Posted : 13/04/2023 9:47 am
I think I saw your ticket, it should be opened some time today. Let me know if you do not get satisfactory support.
I do not think this is a seagate issue, performance on Seagates the past several years has been outstanding.
Posted : 13/04/2023 10:52 am
