Question

3

Would Mdadm be faster than fake raid adapter?

rated 0 times [ 3] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 2896 / 2 Years ago, wed, august 24, 2022, 10:39:47

I just bought myself 2 x 3tb wd red drives and a startech 4 port raid card . Unfortunately, I have a very, very strong suspicion that this is a 'fake-raid' card as it is not from any of the main manufacturers like LSI or 3ware. Transferring files from a WD black 2TB to the raid 1 array is going at an appallingly slow rate of around 60MB/s. Would it not be faster to remove the card, and set up software raid with mdadm?

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Update
I just unplugged/unset the hardware raid 1 array, and re-plugged in the drives directly to the motherboard. Transfers direct from drive to drive appear to go at 120MB/s (exactly double). I realise that raid1 has to duplicate the data, but surely It reads at 120mb/s from one drive and each raid drive should write at nearly 120mb/s on each of the reds?

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urvedcaly

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4 Years ago

answered 2 Years ago barted · Accepted Answer

If you see the individual disks and the whole array shows up as /dev/mapper/something, then it's a fakeraid. While mdadm shouldn't be faster, it is better supported and recommended if you don't need to dual boot with windows.

It looks like this is some old hardware. It says it is legacy old PCI rather than any of the flavors of PCI Express. That means it is limited to a throughput of about 125 MB/s, and since you're writing the data twice to both disks, that's why you are only getting 60 MB/s.