Precision 7920 RAID speed

Question

I'm configuring a 4 SSD RAID0 on a Precision 7920 rack running CentOS, looking for any advice on the best way to do it. So far my speed is quite slow. I think this system is supposed to have Intel RSTe or VRoC for some kind of "hybrid" RAID. In the BIOS there is an option to switch SATA ports from AHCI to RAID mode, but I can't see any options to configure the RAID. The OS sees each individual drive, so I created the array with mdadm. I get about 1GBps read and write, but I expected double that.

I also tried with the SATA ports in AHCI mode and that didn't seem to make any difference. Is there some hardware RAID configuration OpROM that I'm missing? Or some way to make the software RAID faster?

llamafilm · Answer

I don't know what industry you're talking about, but I often use RAID0 with four or eight drives. Like I said before, I'm running CentOS Linux, not Windows.  You're right that each SATA port should handle 600MBps, so four drives in RAID0 should be close to 2000MBps, limited by the drive speed.

Tesla1856 · Answer

@llamafilm wrote:

1. I'm configuring a 4 SSD RAID0

2. I get about 1GBps read and write,

3. I also tried with the SATA ports in AHCI mode and that didn't seem to make any difference.

1. 2-disk RAID-0 is more common

2. Sounds about right since each SATA port is limited to 600.

3. I think you want RAID, with Intel-RST or RSTe installed in Windows.

Tesla1856 · Answer

@llamafilm wrote:  four drives in RAID0 should be close to 2000MBps, limited by the drive speed. So, 4 SATA drives in RAID-0 is almost as fast as a single PCIe/NVMe-SSD ... what a deal.

Precision Fixed Workstations

Precision 7920 RAID speed

Was this post helpful?