cant get t- raid to work correctly

[Technomancer__]

i did my raid configuration and i added 3 drus and 1 ppus

it works fine. i can copy stuff to it and the parity works.

but it doesnt leverage the speed of all the drives when i am writing or reading stuff to it. its like it pools all the drus and then does the parity

btw its not in pool mode its in t raid mode

[Mikensan]

@dalekphalm Might be able to speak more on this..

 

But when I looked up transparent raid by flexraid, it doesn't appear to actually do any sort of stripe which is where you'd get a speed boost from... Just parity. Data is written to one disk at a time, which I assume would see a speed bump if you start writing multiple files in parallel or setup a cache drive.

 

[dalekphalm]

3 hours ago, Ethocreeper said:

i did my raid configuration and i added 3 drus and 1 ppus

it works fine. i can copy stuff to it and the parity works.

but it doesnt leverage the speed of all the drives when i am writing or reading stuff to it. its like it pools all the drus and then does the parity

btw its not in pool mode its in t raid mode

@Mikensan is correct - tRAID (Transparent RAID) mode in FlexRAID is basically Drive Pooling + a separate Parity drive. You will only get a maximum read or write performance of a single drive, under most circumstances. No striping is happening.

 

FlexRAID will by default just fill up one drive, then another, then another, etc. There's an alternate setting in the options that will attempt to balance the drives, where it'll try to keep all drives equally filled, but even in this case, it's only ever writing to one drive at a time.

 

You *can* sometimes leverage higher speeds if you perform multiple separate writes, especially from different computers, but each individual write or read will max out at the speed of one drive.

 

The reason FlexRAID does this is because FlexRAID is a file level RAID system. The drives are still formatted using NTFS. You can literally take out any drive, pop it into another Windows System, and read the data on it.

 

This also means in a catastrophic failure (Eg: In your case, if you had two simultaneous drive failures), you can still read all the data stored on the still-working drives.

 

The other "mode" in FlexRAID is "Snapshot RAID" - the difference between tRAID vs Snapshot RAID is that tRAID will calculate parity in real time, whereas Snapshot RAID will calculate parity based on a schedule.

 

Both Snapshot RAID and tRAID do not stripe data across disks, and therefore, both will have drive read and write speed limitations.

 

You can read a bit more about it here:

http://wiki.flexraid.com/about/what-is-transparent-raid/