Always had slow performance, new RAID makes no difference.

[NavyCricket]

I've always had slow performance when it comes to transfering files on my machine.  It'll start at the expected speed, somewhere around 150MBps, then it'll slow down to less than 1 MBps after a second or two.  I always thought it was because I buy cheap thumb drives, but I'm transfering my Plex library from a 10TB HGST drive to a RAID 5 setup I just made with 5 8TB Seagate ST8000DM004s.  My transfer speed starts at 200ish MBps but after about 5 seconds I'm floating between 30 and 1 MBps.  I've tried flashing BIOS to the latest, changing all BIOS settings to default, disabling Indexing, and re-installing Windows.  I have a ASUS Z370 motherboard, 9900k, 32 GB RAM, a 2070 Super, and my OS is on a 1 TB NVME drive.  I have no idea what to do.  I know the Seagate drives are SMR, but is this really the performance I should expect, ands why would I have seen this slow speed even without these drives?

[Electronics Wizardy]

What are you using to make the raid? What software/hardware are you using?

 

What os are you using?

 

Id try using MDADM on linux for best software raid performance.

[NavyCricket]

I only want to have the one machine for everything.  I use this machine for VR occasionally but mostly office type work, but it'll come onboard a ship with me to act as a Plex server, as well as a offline gaming machine.  It's running Windows 10, so I built the RAID with the Manage Storage Spaces tool in Windows to build a pool with parity.  All 6 of the drives are connected via SATA, 5 for the RAID and the one source drive.

 

The drives are connected to the onboard SATA, and the motherboard recognized all the drives, and windows was able to build the pool without issue.  The motherboard is a ASUS Z370A II Prime.

[Electronics Wizardy]

26 minutes ago, NavyCricket said:

I only want to have the one machine for everything.  I use this machine for VR occasionally but mostly office type work, but it'll come onboard a ship with me to act as a Plex server, as well as a offline gaming machine.  It's running Windows 10, so I built the RAID with the Manage Storage Spaces tool in Windows to build a pool with parity.  All 6 of the drives are connected via SATA, 5 for the RAID and the one source drive.

Storage spaces parity has awful write speeds, so this is expected. You can get a bit better with increasing the number of collums to get it near 100mB/s. Getting a raid card would make this much faster.

[NavyCricket]

I’m not trying to be a jerk, but the only solution cannot be to switch operating system, add more drives, or buy a RAID controller. I don’t buy for a second that a five drive RAID should expect to have a 1 MBps performance expectation, not that the problem I’m having is isolated to my new array. 

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, NavyCricket said:

I’m not trying to be a jerk, but the only solution cannot be to switch operating system, add more drives, or buy a RAID controller. I don’t buy for a second that a five drive RAID should expect to have a 1 MBps performance expectation, not that the problem I’m having is isolated to my new array. 

It's well documented that windows raid 5 has horrible speeds. As a test, try raid 1 and see if you get a speed improvement. 

[NavyCricket]

I changed the RAID from a Windows software solution, to the motherboard utility, which is Intel Rapid Store something.  It seems to be performing better, but I've been cautioned against using a motherboard based solution.  The reasoning is if my motherboard dies, there's little chance that the next generation of hardware is going to be able to restore the array, and I'll lose everything anyway.  Is this a valid concern? 

 

I'm using this array as a Plex server, and it's one of two copies, so I'm not worried about losing things permanently, but if I have an unrecoverable failure while I'm out to sea, I'm out for a along time. What do you think?