RAID 5 Extremly slow write speed!?

Hi,

1) if you have a UPS backup, you should -> Computer Management->Device Manager->Disk Drives. Bring up the property page for your raid disk and select Policies. Make sure that both Enable write-caching is on and also select "Turn off Windows write-cache buffer flushing on the device". Without buffer flushing you should see performance ~200-250MB/sec. With buffer flushing you are probably writing slower than a single drive. Windows will flush everything when you do a shutdown. Also, see the Windows Sysinternals package for a command to "sync" a device.

The reason for the UPS is that you need a means to protect your disk data (including raid metadata) from being lost. If your system has other reliability issues that cause system crashes, you should let Windows flush its write-cache buffer. Also, you might not need an expensive UPS, but be aware that cheap UPS's can be the flakiest device that you can plugin. There's nothing more disconcerting to me than to see a UPS quit even when there is line power.

2) 110MB/sec is not very good either. You might check the other machine's buffer flush settings.

3) You are likely losing some performance because your raid disk drives aren't all the same model. Even though the consumer description may say 7200RPM, 16MB disk cache and SATA-2, there are different access times and effective transfer rates from model to model and from vendor to vendor. You will likely find that one vendor's drives perform better/worse in this setting.

Oh yes, don't use the so-called "green" drives for raid-5 and make sure your setup BIOS is configured to power up drives with a ~2 sec delay. You'll wind up watching a disk get reconstructed when a drive drops out of the raid configuration.

Art