I'm seeking feedback from others who have built a 3 to 6 disk RAID 5 array using the onboard RAID controller in a Z87 motherboard. I would like to know what kind of read/write performance you're experiencing with RAID 5 onboard controller.
My hardware and operating system...
- Asus Z87-Plus Motherboard
- Intel i7 -4770K 3.5GHz Processor LGA 1150
- 16GB DDR3 1600 Memory
- Samsung 840 Pro 240GB SDD Boot Drive
- 5 x 1TB Western Digital SATA2 64MB RAID Drives Connected to onboard RAID controller in RAID 5 config 64KB block size. 3.8TB addressable storage as data disk
- Windows 7 Pro 64Bit
I just finished building this computer primarily to edit photographs with Photoshop and Lightroom. I typically import 200 to 1000 photos at a time over a USB 3.0 connection. Each photo is either 18MB or 21MB depending on the camera. The OS and apps are installed on the SSD drive and the pictures are imported to the data drive which is the RAID 5 array described above.
Writing large quantities of big files seems to bottom out at around 30MB per second after a relatively short period of time.
I'm wondering if I install a dedicated RAID controller, if I will see dramatic performance improvements or not. IN OTHER WORDS, IS THE JUICE WORTH THE SQUEEZE?
I benchmarked my new build above against my old build below which is...
i5 processor
8GB RAM
4 x 500MB RAID 0 boot drive at 75% capacity.
Adaptec 5805 RAID controller
Windows 7 Pro 64bit
The first test was real world. I copied 1300 pictures off the same camera onto the two machines. They both took about 17 minutes to copy all the files. 18MB x 1300 files = 23.4GB
Then I ran CrystalDiskMark and I have posted the results below.
RAID 0 disk test results...
Sequential Read : 96.795 MB/s
Sequential Write : 148.903 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 62.117 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 96.405 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.843 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 1.968 MB/s
Test Size : 1000 MB
Date : 2013/11/19 15:28:18
RAID 5 disk test results...
Sequential Read : 355.771 MB/s
Sequential Write : 31.865 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 49.445 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 17.387 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.590 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 0.305 MB/s
Test Size : 1000 MB
Date : 2013/11/19 15:27:05
If others are getting similar results with a dedicated RAID controller, then I will save the time, money and aggravation of adding the the controller. I'm just surprised at how slow it appears on the benchmark.
Thanks in advance for your feedback.