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Dell T30 Disk Performance Issue

DELL T30 with SATA disk encouter disk performance issue.
3 x SATA 1 TB HDDs (Software RAID 5)
* does not support hardware controller
* Windows Server 2012R2 Std

After do some checking, notice the disk encounter very high latency on read /write the files.

Behavior
- System will hang if having a read and write activity.
- Encounter very slow responding when there is some disk running (e.g. copy past document)
- Do a check, CPU and Memory usage is low, only the disk having high activity.

Any idea how can i overcome this issue? without buying a new hardware to replace this.

I'm thinking adding a Synology NAS Storage and attach as iSCSI volume and store all the data.

What do you think?
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dfke

Hi,

Having RAID 5 won't increase write performance upon adding extra disks, just the overall read performance. If your application has a high write ratio then try to enable write-cache buffer flushing, and set the cache mode to Write back in your Intel Rapid Storage Technology‘s Performance tab. Other than that swithing to RAID 10 might be an option.

Cheers.
You would have better performance if you added another disk and used RAID 10, RAID 5 and RAID 6 give very poor performance on the inbuilt fakeRAID controller. (Dell say it is software RAID, but the more common term is fakeRAID since it is a form of hardware RAID where the CPU/chipset do all the work. The term "software RAID" refers to RAID running under the OS  as far as everyone except Dell are concerned).

A Synology NAS with only 3 7.2K disks in RAID 5 would perform equally poorly.
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ASKER

HI dfke, do you mean on the Device Manager - HDDs setting on the policies the "enable write caching on the device"?  let me do a check, as i understand this should be enabled by defaults.

As for the cache mode to Write back in your Intel Rapid Storage Technology‘s  let me check it out as well and update.

Hi andyalder, my concern is adding the additional HDDs and it not solving the issue. then need to spend another $$ to find another solution for it. As for the Synology side, i'm thinking to have a SSD M.2 as cache and install with SATA disk as Storage pool. this will be present as ISCSI to the Windows Server 2012R2 as additional drive letter.
You would be very brave enabling write-back, get a power cut and the data may well be corrupt.

You can always put the extra disk in the NAS if it does not improve the speed. Taking one out would improve write speed too, RAID 1 with 2 disks is faster write than RAID 5 with 3 disks.
Just curious, how full is that disk? Might just be a performance issue getting fragmented data at this point if very full.
Also, if you are seeing high risk activity, what processes are hitting the disk all the time?  Is physical memory full and there is a lot of paging activity?

Also, lately I have been seeing Dropbox on one of my systems reindexing a large folder just swamping that disks performance. A running backup may also cause that issue, as well as other cloud storage systems checking for file updates.
One more thing to check: see if you are getting read and write errors. Maybe the drive is just failing and slowing things down.

To begin the scan, right-click on the Drive which you wish to check and select Properties. Next, click on Tools tab and under Error-checking, click on the Check button. This option will check the drive for file system errors. If the system detects that there are errors, you will be asked to check the disk
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ASKER

Due to the performance issue, we run a tools on the server and report as below:

- High Write Latency
- During disk writing there is a Queue Depth also return high.

Therefore I'm suspect the disk read/write is slow.... so the NAS is capable to SSD capability "read-write caching"

Hopefully by using the NAS method able to overcome the disk issue....
Which Synology are you considering buying? Are you going to get rid of the Dell server entirely and run Windows in a VM on it?
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ASKER

It will be a DS918+ with 2 x m.2 SSD + 2 x SATA disk installed. to help improve the disk performance.

At this point of time, i just thinking to attach the Synology to Server directly via iSCSI method. and to store all the File Share data and finance database.

The existing OS 2012R2 with the SATA disk will just remain to server as OS only.

And you have share a good point "VM"...   Hyper-V VM.. which i never think off. where it can run directly from the Synology disk.

Thanks.
Incredible isn't it that the NAS box is faster even though it has a slower CPU cannot. You would think Dell SLOW SATA CRAP.

Sorry, practicing gobbledygook atm.
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ASKER

HI Andyalder, yes. do understand also....  

let me share some information with you. do a performance monitoring. notice the server is running peak at 32% CPU and 60% memory.

the sad thing is I can't change the hardware.. need to find a way to improve it and make it work...

i feel the software RAID is crap.... without a hardware cache capability...
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