Areca Raid Gurus.. Need advice with Raid 5 setup

[Alex Gerulaitis]

Here’s their response:

“We are still looking into the issue. Our engineers have not seen consistent results making it difficult to resolve.”

I’d encourage sending your benchmarks with slow(er) read speeds to Areca support and/or publishing them here, so that Areca engineers can see a more consistent picture of the problem.

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[Eric Cardenas]

Any new developments on this issue.
I’ve recently acquired an ARC-8050 that is exhibiting the same behaviour as the OP.
Read speeds are too slow and they have a slow ramp up time of about 5 seconds.

Thanks.

/Eric

[Geoff Saville]

I’m diggin up an old thread here, but I’m at my wits end.

I’ve got an Areca 1883x and I’m continuously running into this issue, with slow, erratic, read and write speeds.

I’ve rebuilt the RAId (RAID5) several times and each time the performance is resolved, but every time it eventually end up a slow horrible mess.

I’m using WD enterprise drives and have been in touch with Proavio to get some assistance. They have been great, but I’m yet to find a solution to this problem.

It seems that once the raid fills up to about 25-30% full, the performance falls off a cliff.

I go from about 1000 read/write to 500/300 read/write and the results in the AJA disk test show very erratic speed spikes.

Once the RAID is rebuilt, the spikes disappears, performance comes back and it behaves as expected.

I’m beginning to think I need to test each drive one at a time by loading it up with data to see if there’s an issue with the outer edges of a disk, but moving everything off the RAID is something I don’t have time for right now.

Any suggestions on some things to try to narrow this down?

I’ve attached the enclosure and controller to a completely different PC, but get identical performance.

I’ve also defragged and run a volume check weekly, there’s nothing out of the ordinary there. Also, testing each drive with the Areca tool, shows no obvious speed differences with any individual drive.

I’m running Windows 10.

This is starting to drive me crazy. Every time I think it’s finally sorted, but it seems that as I load more data onto the raid the issue always comes back.

[Alex Gardiner]

I was going to reply to this a while ago, then got sidetracked.

Hopefully you used drives from the Areca HCL.

No idea how big your volumes are, but maybe try making two smaller file systems on top of the array and see if you get the same slowdown when they start to get full. Sorry but thats the only thing I could think of trying, other than returning the card for a replacement… FWIW Its not beyond the realm of possibility that the card is faulty, although I’d assume you’ll have some logging somewhere (just not sure where this card puts is on Windows).

Storage Engineer
alex@indiestor.com