Hello,
I'm administering a RAID5 Array running on a Windows Server 2008 system using a HighPoint RocketRAID 2320 controller and Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB drives (w/ latest firmware).
The system uses a software based RAID1 Array on separate hard disks for the OS and allocats all of the RAID5 array to a single 'Data' partition.
We recently added another drive to RAID5 array, raising the number of drives from 3 (3 TB of usable space), to 4 (4.5 TB of usable space). I added the drive, expanded the array live via the Highpoint RAID Management Utility, and then added the new unformatted/unpartitioned space to the 'Data' partition using Disk Management "Extend Volume..." utility.
Everything worked fine, but now, a day after extending the partion, we seem to be experiencing a performance hit on the partition. We stream .wav files off of this partition over a local network, and we're not getting the throughput we were before, leading to periodic skipping in the audio.
Is this just a temporary artifact of Server 2008 completing it's partiton expansion onto the new space? When I extended the volume, it did it immediately, but I imagine there is still some background time it takes to have the volume completely up and back to full performance? Is this "immediate" expansion hiding the underlying process that actually expands and formats the new space, thus leading to a temporary performance hit immediately after expanding?
I am currently planning on waiting a few days and hoping the problem fixes itself, but any advise or insight would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Andy
