RAID5 Initializing Parity

  • Thread starter Thread starter Seth Gecko
  • Start date Start date
S

Seth Gecko

Hi

I recently built myself a new PC and decided to go RAID5.
Everythings great but today my PC did not want to come out of standby so I
hit the reset
button and reboot.

It then takes about 8 hours while it goes through an "Initializing Parity"
proceedure,
whilst obviously degrading my performance. Is this going to happen everytime
I get a lock up or for some other reason i need to do a reset ?

I have a

Dual Core P4 3.0GHz
Gigabyte 8i955x Royal Motherboard (Intel 955 Chipset)
3 x Seagate 400GB Serial ATA Hard Drives in a RAID 5 configuration using the
onboard Intel Matrix ICHR7 chipset with the Intel Matrix Storage Console
utility
where i can monitor the drives from within windows. Inside this utility
i enabled VOLUME WRITE BACK cache

"This is used with RAID 5 only the Write-Back Cache feature is supported by
the Intel Matrix Storage Manager driver to enhance read/write performance of
a RAID 5 array."

Nvidia GE Force 7800GT
Creative X-Fi Fatality Soundcard
Windows XP SP2


This is my first experience with RAID 5, Is this "rebuilding" going to
happen everytime ?

Thanks in advance for any help !
 
Seth Gecko said:
darn !!
Click to expand...


That's why having a raid controller with battery backed cache may be
worth the extra cost, particularly if you don't have a reliable UPS.
 
I wanted the best performance i could get


Yousuf Khan said:
If this is your boot disk, then you might be better off using using
mirroring (RAID 1) rather than a RAID 5.

Yousuf Khan
Click to expand...
 
Seth said:
I wanted the best performance i could get
Click to expand...

Then you went with the exact opposite of what you really needed. RAID5
is a a slight bit faster than single disk when reading (and assuming
that you don't have one drive gone bad). However, RAID5 is much slower
at writes that a single disk. The highest performance and most secure
setup is by far the RAID 0+1 style.

Yousuf Khan
 
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