What affects RAID

[MrSaw]

Hi, 

 

I'm doing a Skylake build and wanted to ask: 

 

With a raid array running from the onboard raid controller, does hyperthreading or clock speed affect the raid speeds much?

 

What sort of hardware factors affect onboard raid performance?

 

Thanks

[scottyseng]

1 minute ago, MrSaw said:

-snip-

Well, the RAID level matters a fair bit. RAID 5 and 6 tend to run pretty badly on onboard RAID. The other RAID levels you're probably only going to see 1-5% CPU usage. RAID doesn't use much CPU as long as it's not a parity based RAID (RAID 5 or 6).

 

The big hitter though is the speed of the drives you are RAIDing. RAID is bottlenecked by whatever is the slowest drive in the array (if you are mixing drives).

 

You can't really bottleneck RAID that easily with how fast CPUs are these days. (Especially on skylake)

[Naeaes]

3 minutes ago, MrSaw said:

Hi, 

 

I'm doing a Skylake build and wanted to ask: 

 

With a raid array running from the onboard raid controller, does hyperthreading or clock speed affect the raid speeds much?

 

What sort of hardware factors affect onboard raid performance?

 

Thanks

I've noticed that the speed on RAID0 doesn't scale well if you're using three or more SSDs on an on-board controller, but other than that, nothing really impacts it. You're still bottle-necked by the drives themselves so messing with settings doesn't do jack.

[MrSaw]

Sorry, should've specified, Raid 5 with wd red drives at 5400rpm

[scottyseng]

10 minutes ago, MrSaw said:

Sorry, should've specified, Raid 5 with wd red drives at 5400rpm

Hmm, does the motherboard have RAID 5 (Some do, some don't). How many drives?

[SydneySideSteveSomewheres]

A power failure could be a small factor in your raid, as the data sent by the OS to the array may be only in the cache at the power loss moment. When or if this occurs a power failure could cause a loss of data which could corrupt the whole array, low odds of the worst case scenario occurring, but still something to contemplate.

[leadeater]

31 minutes ago, MrSaw said:

Sorry, should've specified, Raid 5 with wd red drives at 5400rpm

You won't want to use RAID 5 using onboard RAID, it will be horrifically slow. Think 30MB/s as the best you will get for write performance. Also from experience high amounts of overclocking generally makes the SATA controllers unstable and can cause issues with RAID.

 

RAID 0 or RAID 1 work perfectly fine, if you need parity RAID upgrade to a proper hardware RAID card or use a software solution (Windows Storage Spaces or Software RAID).

[MrSaw]

3 hours ago, scottyseng said:

Hmm, does the motherboard have RAID 5 (Some do, some don't). How many drives?

Yes it does. Looking at either a Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3 or Asus Z170-AR

 

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

You won't want to use RAID 5 using onboard RAID, it will be horrifically slow. Think 30MB/s as the best you will get for write performance. Also from experience high amounts of overclocking generally makes the SATA controllers unstable and can cause issues with RAID.

 

RAID 0 or RAID 1 work perfectly fine, if you need parity RAID upgrade to a proper hardware RAID card or use a software solution (Windows Storage Spaces or Software RAID).

I'll be using a 60gb SSD as a cache for the array, so that will help reduce the effect of the write speed reduction