Poor Performance with 4x 980 Pro 2TB in Raid Enclosure

[Talisman2208]

Hello! I have 4x 980 Pro 2TB drives, I don't have enough slots on my Mobo so I purchased a This Highpoint Raid Enclosure. Once I got everything set up, I realized it doesn't matter whether or not I'm in raid 0, Raid 1, or Raid 10, My performance is terrible. 

 

Any configuration I do, I get about 3.5GB  Seq Read and Write. Before I had them in this enclosure, I was getting 7gb / 5gb. R/W.  Even in a windows pool. 

 

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? 

 

I have a MSI MPG Z690 Edge WiFi DDR4

[RONOTHAN##]

Which PCIe slot is it in? If it's not in the top x16 slot, you'll be in an x4 PCIe slot which is limited to the speeds that you're seeing. 

[PDifolco]

4 minutes ago, Talisman2208 said:

Hello! I have 4x 980 Pro 2TB drives, I don't have enough slots on my Mobo so I purchased a This Highpoint Raid Enclosure. Once I got everything set up, I realized it doesn't matter whether or not I'm in raid 0, Raid 1, or Raid 10, My performance is terrible. 

 

Any configuration I do, I get about 3.5GB  Seq Read and Write. Before I had them in this enclosure, I was getting 7gb / 5gb. R/W.  Even in a windows pool. 

 

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? 

 

I have a MSI MPG Z690 Edge WiFi DDR4

 

Suspect you can only get x8 on GPU slot or the second long PCie slot, that's why

[Zando_]

1) That card is explicitly PCIe 3.0, those are 4.0 drives.

2) Aside from the top slot (where I assume your GPU is) that motherboard has no PCIe slots that would support a PCIe 4.0 add-in card to begin with, at best you could use a 1x PCIe 3.0 one:

[Talisman2208]

Thank you for shedding light on this @Zando_Okay so - 

 

Essentially what I would need is, A card such as this that supports 4 drives, with PCI-E 4.0, as well as a board that supports 2x PCI.E 4 + slots, like this:

 

[Zando_]

10 minutes ago, Talisman2208 said:

as well as a board that supports 2x PCI.E 4 + slots, like this:

That would only support 2 drives at full speed if you use a GPU. As when the second slot is populated, the two CPU slots run at x8 each. You need a full x16 slot, running at x16, for 4 drives. On mainstream that means either no dGPU, or run it through chipset (which would perform terribly). Best to just get that Hyper M.2 and then only run 2 drives in it. Though I would get this one, same but a chunk cheaper, not sure why the one you linked costs $100.

 

EDIT: Also, for these cards the motherboard needs to support PCIe slot bifurcation. Most mid to high end boards do now, but best to confirm.

 

[Blue4130]

20 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

That would only support 2 drives at full speed if you use a GPU. As when the second slot is populated, the two CPU slots run at x8 each. You need a full x16 slot, running at x16, for 4 drives. On mainstream that means either no dGPU, or run it through chipset (which would perform terribly). Best to just get that Hyper M.2 and then only run 2 drives in it. Though I would get this one, same but a chunk cheaper, not sure why the one you linked costs $100.

 

EDIT: Also, for these cards the motherboard needs to support PCIe slot bifurcation. Most mid to high end boards do now, but best to confirm.

 

Or use his highpoint card... It has a plx switch chip. It can use 4 drives on a PCI-e x1 slot if need be (at a very reduced data rate obviously) 

[Zando_]

6 minutes ago, Blue4130 said:

Or use his highpoint card... It has a plx switch chip. It can use 4 drives on a PCI-e x1 slot if need be (at a very reduced data rate obviously) 

You should read the original post and look at the spec for the highpoint card. It is a PCIe 3.0 card, which is why he is not getting the full speed out of his drives, which is the problem he made the post to solve in the first place.

[Talisman2208]

@Zando_Okay, You're really giving me an education today. 

 

So in theory - would these drives perform better on a PCI E Gen 4 4x, each utilizing one lane, than they do on my PCI E Gen 3 4x each utilizing one lane? 

[Talisman2208]

@Zando_ So am I understanding this correctly? I'm basically getting ~4GB/s Because the bandwidth is 1GB per second per lane, and in raid 0 I'm pulling from each lane so max speed would be 4GB's. 

 

If I were to jump to PCIe 4.0 in theory my bandwidth would be 8GB's, and in PCIE 5.0 it would be 16GB/s (Theoretical Maximum) 

 

Right?

 

[Zando_]

3 hours ago, Talisman2208 said:

@Zando_Okay, You're really giving me an education today. 

 

So in theory - would these drives perform better on a PCI E Gen 4 4x, each utilizing one lane, than they do on my PCI E Gen 3 4x each utilizing one lane? 

3 hours ago, Talisman2208 said:

If I were to jump to PCIe 4.0 in theory my bandwidth would be 8GB's, and in PCIE 5.0 it would be 16GB/s (Theoretical Maximum) 

Yep to both! PCIe doubles bandwidth per gen, so using a 4.0 or 5.0 slot would be a lot better.

 

Be aware on any mainstream boards that most slots are through the chipset, usually only up to 2 are through the CPU. IIRC most current chipsets are using a PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 x4 uplink to the CPU, so whatever you put on those slots has to share that bandwidth with USB, SATA, all the other stuff that goes through chipset. That said, usually you aren't stressing everything at once so it should still be usable.

 

[Talisman2208]

Thanks for your help. @Zando_ that's better, I think right? I did a 4kb stripe, no idea what that means, but that's what it recommended. 

 

Do these numbers look okay? 

 

 

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