We purchased an OptiPlex 7050 Tower running Windows 10 Pro for a customer with two 1TB 2.5" drives in RAID1 from the factory. When I started prepping the machine for installation, I installed updates (Dell and Windows) and changed the RAID caching settings to disable "Write-cache buffer flushing" and then set Cache mode to Write Back. After doing that, the computer installed Windows updates fine but started locking up when copying large amounts of data. I started testing and found that if I had the cache mode set to Write Back and then tried to copy 2GB+ of files, the Windows copy dialog would go to about 10-20% and then just drop to 0. At that point, nothing that accessed the hard drives would work and I'd have to power off the computer.
If I change the cache mode to Write Through, there are no issues with locking up. I checked and there was no update from Dell for the Intel RST drivers (15.7.xxx) but there was an updated version from Intel (15.9.xxx) and so I updated but have the same results. Anyone else having issues like this? I've run into it on two different OptiPlex 7050 towers.
Did you ever find a solution for this? I have a new out of the box 7050 i7 16GB Windows 10 Professional with Raid 1 (7200 rpm) and it’s dog slow. Initial windows updates took over 10 hours and finally just got stuck. A system recovery didn’t help and simple tasks such as starting SupportAssist send the disks to 100% utilization and the app never launches. I see some improvement by disabling the second disk from the BIOS, but the system is still sluggish.
We didn't find any resolution to the locking up other than to set the caching to Write-Through. If it is set to disabled, the system will be extremely slow and if it is set to Write-Back it will be unstable. My recommendation is to set the caching to Write-Through and make sure to let the RAID array initialize fully before trying to update or use the computer. You can monitor the initialization from the Intel RST software in Windows.
We ended up replacing the hard drive with SSD in our 7050.
BlueMouseSolutions
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Posted May 31st, 2018 09:00
Hi -
Did you ever find a solution for this? I have a new out of the box 7050 i7 16GB Windows 10 Professional with Raid 1 (7200 rpm) and it’s dog slow. Initial windows updates took over 10 hours and finally just got stuck. A system recovery didn’t help and simple tasks such as starting SupportAssist send the disks to 100% utilization and the app never launches. I see some improvement by disabling the second disk from the BIOS, but the system is still sluggish.