Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of funkbomb
funkbomb

asked on

RAID 0 Extremely Slow

Recently my RAID 0 setup has been extremely slow, with read/write speeds averaging about 2MB/sec. It's been causing problems in a whole lot of applications. I've tried reinstalling RAID drivers, enabling/disabling read/write cache, enabling/disabling RAID in bios, and defragmenting the whole thing. What's going on? How can I run diagnostics?

I am testing read/write speeds with Bart Stuff Test v5. When I test with HDTach, I get an average of 87MB/sec. Why the huge difference?

There is only one idea I have as to what could have caused this; I tried to defragment the RAID disk a while ago, just because I had heard it was a good idea. I used O&O Defrag's "COMPLETE/Access" method of defragmentation, but after leaving it alone for 6 hours and getting 1% progress, I cancelled it.

After getting issues, I went back and let it complete the whole process using the "STEALTH" method, but the slow speeds persist.

For comparison, the IDE drive my system is running off of is averaging about 24MB/sec read/write.  

Windows XP 64-bit
4xWestern Digital 250GB SATA in RAID 0 configuration
Tyan Thunder K8WE S2895 Motherboard, Dual Opteron 270
4 GB RAM

Avatar of IanTh
IanTh
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

is it still rebuilding
Avatar of funkbomb
funkbomb

ASKER

Don't know what that means. How can one tell?
are all the drives running and its led will be on all the time

how old are your western digital drives as the could be stating to fail which gives major problems to the raid controller
normal hdd's where not designed for raid really
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of coredatarecovery
coredatarecovery
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
I forgot to tell you, in striping mode, if either drive fails, you lose everything.

SO, I highly recommend you backup the entire thing immediately.
>enabling/disabling RAID in bios...

Methinks it is RAID 1, not RAID 0 since it wouldn't boot if you disabled RAID in BIOS with RAID 0.
It's not my boot drive.
I suppose if no one has any more suggestions than I guess a drive must indeed be failing. Unfortunately it's a 4 disk RAID so I have to replace all four of them.
Well then, you wouldn't be able to access it f it was RAID 0 with RAID disabled.
That's correct. I said I had tried disabling and then re-enabling it again as a way of "cycling" it.
I don't see why you have to replace all four,

back it up, wipe the disk config and set each one as a seperate disk, test each one and you should identify the faulty one. Then re-build using a new disk to replace the failed one.
Yep, turned out to be a faulty drive. Replaced it, and everything is better.