MSA 2012i - performance to expect from 5 drives

[KCalliauw]

Hi,

we recently opted to buy a low-cost storage solution which would be expandable as our needs grow. We went with the 2012i with 5x 300GB disks (They appear to be seagates). One of them acts as a hotspare and substracting 300GB parity from that, we're left with 900GB of effective storage.

We've tried connecting them to dual HP Procurve 1800-24 switches, but also directly to our Cisco Catalyst 6500 switch module. Both yielded a maximum of 50MB/sec (Tried HDTune Pro, SNMP monitoring while concurrently copying the same folder with loads of small files in it, looking at stats on the switch, ...)

Is this the performance we should expect? If so, can we expect the performance to become better by adding more disks?

Best regards,
Koen