Problems with RAID on LH 3

[Florian Walter]

Hello,

I've made a new installation of Win2k Server on a Netserver LH3. It has 6 disks on the integrated NetRAID controller, 5 for a RAID 5 Array and 1 as Hot Spare.
My problem is that the performance of the RAID is absolutly poor. It writes with about 2-3Mb/sec and reads with about 6-7Mb/sec. I think it should be much faster.
The stripesize is set to 64k. Where is the problem (or is the performance OK for this kind of Array?)

[e4services]

It could be that one of the drives had a problem. WHat are the drives? Size, age, etc.
Does one access light flash more than the others?

[Florian Walter]

The drives are all from HP but manufactored by Seagate I think. The size of the drives is 9GB. I don't really know how old they are but the lights are flashing all very equally.
The NetRaid Diagtool sais, that all drives are ok...
What can I do?

[Joseph Campbell]

What are you using to test the through put of this array? Are the drives on one channel of the controler or two? How much cache is on the controler?

Joe Campbell

[Le Gouellec]

the problem is that you're using a raid 5, if you want to have the best compromise, you must use a raid 0+1

[Ian Wilson_1]

Are you sure the controller is set to Ultra-2?.
What is the NTFS allocation block size set to ?
I once spent a day experimenting with different
stripe size v block sizes, and found a combination that jumped the read rate from less than 10M/sec to 15.6M/sec. This was a raid 0 array, and not on a LH.
I found that for this particular server, a NTFS block size of 1/4 the stripe size gave the best performance.
I'm sure that for a LH with Raid5 the ratio will probably be different, just play with the sizes.

Ian