So this has been my first foray into raid 5, I have done a lot of things in the past with raid 0, 1, and 10 before but felt that raid 5 was a better fit for the use case I was going for in this build.
I have built a small home server, mainly for media and storage, running Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter (got a free copy through school a few years back), and for storage I am using 4x 3TB Western Digital Red hard drives, all connected to an LSI MegaRAID 9266-8i raid controller.
The problem I have ran into is that the RAID 5 performance has turned out to be horrid, and I know this hardware should be doing better than it is, so hopefully someone else can point out what I have done wrong.
So first off, before building the RAID, I tested each drive simply by running CrystalDiskMark. Each hard drive gave me pretty close to identical performance numbers so they all seemed to be in good and operating condition. Below is an image of an individual drives performance.
As you can see, individually, these drives perform about as well as you can expect a mechanical drive to perform.
However, the RAID 5 has much worse numbers than I ever expected. The reads seem to be decent, but the writes are just abysmally slow.
I know that RAID 5 has a good bit of overhead when it comes to writes, and that writes don't scale nearly as well as reads do in this setup, but to see writes drop from 150MB/s per drive to just 15MB/s for the entire RAID just can't be right.
So hopefully someone who is more familiar with LSI and their MegaRAID cards and software can help me out on how to improve performance. Below you will find a breakdown of what I did to set up the RAID, along with screenshots of its current settings.
So first off I installed the card into a PCI-e x16 slot, then booted up the server, logged in, installed the newest drivers, installed LSI's storcli command line tool, and installed their MegaRAID Storage Manager Software. Once that was installed, I started up MegaRAID Storage Manager and updated the LSI cards firmware to the newest they had available, which I followed up with a reboot, despite the software telling me it wasn't actually needed, but it made me feel better.
After everything was booted back up, I opened the software again and clicked the "Create Virtual Drive' option, followed their simple setup wizard for my Raid 5, and told the software to start initializing the raid.
The initialization took about 50 hours. After the initialization was done however, I was a bit confused, and I feel this may be the part where things went wrong, and hopefully someone will be able to tell me. I was under the impression, that when the initialization finished that Windows would then recognize the drive and assign it a drive letter and allow me to access it. However, the initialization completed, but the drive remained inaccessible. I opened windows Disk Management tool, and upon opening it, it told me that I needed to initialize the disk with a GPT partition table before I could format it or assign it a drive letter, so I went ahead and let it. Then formatted it as NTFS, and gave it a drive letter. This process took about 10 minutes. At this point I could access it, but performance was poor as shown above. Should windows have recognized the drive after MegaRAID Storage Manager's initialization without me having to open the Windows Disk Management tool? Should the Disk Management tool have asked me to initialize the drive, even though MegaRAID just did? Did letting Disk Management initialize things, effectively make the work the MegaRAID card had done over the past 50 hours null? What can I do to improve performance? Should I start over on building the RAID? Should I just reinitialize it through the MegaRAID software?
Honestly, I would be happy just to hit 100MB/s as most of the interaction with this server will be through Gigabit LAN, very rarely will I have more access bandwidth than that anyway.
The current status information the MegaRAID Storage Manager gives on the drive (note you can see in the bottome the the Initialization does complete, about an hour after that time is when I opened the Windows Disk Manager):
The current settings for the RAID:
And the current list of commands that the software allows me to use on the virtual drive on it right click context menu:
Any help would be much appreciated, and if you need anymore information at all, I would be happy to get it to you. I have tried to be as thorough as possible above, but if I missed something, just let me know.
I have built a small home server, mainly for media and storage, running Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter (got a free copy through school a few years back), and for storage I am using 4x 3TB Western Digital Red hard drives, all connected to an LSI MegaRAID 9266-8i raid controller.
The problem I have ran into is that the RAID 5 performance has turned out to be horrid, and I know this hardware should be doing better than it is, so hopefully someone else can point out what I have done wrong.
So first off, before building the RAID, I tested each drive simply by running CrystalDiskMark. Each hard drive gave me pretty close to identical performance numbers so they all seemed to be in good and operating condition. Below is an image of an individual drives performance.
As you can see, individually, these drives perform about as well as you can expect a mechanical drive to perform.
However, the RAID 5 has much worse numbers than I ever expected. The reads seem to be decent, but the writes are just abysmally slow.
I know that RAID 5 has a good bit of overhead when it comes to writes, and that writes don't scale nearly as well as reads do in this setup, but to see writes drop from 150MB/s per drive to just 15MB/s for the entire RAID just can't be right.
So hopefully someone who is more familiar with LSI and their MegaRAID cards and software can help me out on how to improve performance. Below you will find a breakdown of what I did to set up the RAID, along with screenshots of its current settings.
So first off I installed the card into a PCI-e x16 slot, then booted up the server, logged in, installed the newest drivers, installed LSI's storcli command line tool, and installed their MegaRAID Storage Manager Software. Once that was installed, I started up MegaRAID Storage Manager and updated the LSI cards firmware to the newest they had available, which I followed up with a reboot, despite the software telling me it wasn't actually needed, but it made me feel better.
After everything was booted back up, I opened the software again and clicked the "Create Virtual Drive' option, followed their simple setup wizard for my Raid 5, and told the software to start initializing the raid.
The initialization took about 50 hours. After the initialization was done however, I was a bit confused, and I feel this may be the part where things went wrong, and hopefully someone will be able to tell me. I was under the impression, that when the initialization finished that Windows would then recognize the drive and assign it a drive letter and allow me to access it. However, the initialization completed, but the drive remained inaccessible. I opened windows Disk Management tool, and upon opening it, it told me that I needed to initialize the disk with a GPT partition table before I could format it or assign it a drive letter, so I went ahead and let it. Then formatted it as NTFS, and gave it a drive letter. This process took about 10 minutes. At this point I could access it, but performance was poor as shown above. Should windows have recognized the drive after MegaRAID Storage Manager's initialization without me having to open the Windows Disk Management tool? Should the Disk Management tool have asked me to initialize the drive, even though MegaRAID just did? Did letting Disk Management initialize things, effectively make the work the MegaRAID card had done over the past 50 hours null? What can I do to improve performance? Should I start over on building the RAID? Should I just reinitialize it through the MegaRAID software?
Honestly, I would be happy just to hit 100MB/s as most of the interaction with this server will be through Gigabit LAN, very rarely will I have more access bandwidth than that anyway.
The current status information the MegaRAID Storage Manager gives on the drive (note you can see in the bottome the the Initialization does complete, about an hour after that time is when I opened the Windows Disk Manager):
The current settings for the RAID:
And the current list of commands that the software allows me to use on the virtual drive on it right click context menu:
Any help would be much appreciated, and if you need anymore information at all, I would be happy to get it to you. I have tried to be as thorough as possible above, but if I missed something, just let me know.
