Shocking performance of RAID 5 on Thecus N4100+ - migrate to Nvidia MediaShield?

[diewrecked]

Hi guys

I have been using an N4100+ with four 750Gb drives on RAID 5 for a few years now and it never ceases to amaze - and frustrate - me just how shockingly slow it is. It takes so long to open a folder of photo thumbnails that I've never got to the end of one - I timed it once and EACH THUMBNAIL TOOK 90 SECONDS TO APPEAR!!! That cannot be right!

Anyway I was doing some research into alternatives for this sorry state of affairs and it turns out that the mobo I installed on my PC last year (MSI P6N SLI Platinum) has the Nvidia MediaShield RAID controller built into it. I was wondering if any of you could advise:
1. what the performance of this controller is like compared to the one on the N4100+? I really can't imagine it could be any worse but would like to check.
2. if I just plug these four drives straight into it and configure the BIOS to point to the array, will it work straight out of the box or will I need to copy all my data off, rebuild the array with the new controller then copy it all back again?

Many thanks in advance you guys
Cheers

 

[teknojnky]

1) duno

2) you would have the copy the data off the n4100 then put the disks into your motherboard/case, configure the bios, initialize and format the array, then restore your data.

 

[SimonD]

TBH if I were you and you were going to rebuild the box into a working NAS\SAN device then I would look at a better controller (a dedicated card rather than onboard), I would also look at dedicated NAS\SAN software (OpenFiler, FreeNas or unRAID) instead of using a normal OS.

And a +1 for removing the data and recreating the RAID set, you don't know what kind of format it's in (how it's presented etc). Without knowing that you wouldn't know what OS could read and present it.

 

[diewrecked]

TBH if I were you and you were going to rebuild the box into a working NAS\SAN device then I would look at a better controller (a dedicated card rather than onboard), I would also look at dedicated NAS\SAN software (OpenFiler, FreeNas or unRAID) instead of using a normal OS.

Thanks for this Simon.

Do you have any experience of OpenFiler, FreeNAS or UnRAID? Is there one you particularly recommend? How do they fare against MediaShield?

I should add that I don't want to install it as a proprietary build - I need it to be sitting in and available in my normal Windows XP build (either as a driver, or application, or service); AFAIK most if not all of the above are their own build based on Linux? Which basically would put me straight back to MediaShield, yes?

Apologies if I'm missing the point here!

Thanks again

 

[teknojnky]

generally, on motherboard 'raid' is not really a true hardware raid. Most of them will not work without a software drive component for whichever operating system you use. No driver for your OS = no raid for you.

linux based raid is generally all software based. Yes this means that you may lose some performance of a true hardware raid (ie external raid card), but you typically gain more flexibility and portability ie more raid modes, expandable, and generally you can usually take the drives from one linux box to another of the same kind without worrying about the specifics of the hardware.

as far as the different flavors of linux 'nas' software, really it boils down to wht your preferences and experience/capabilities are.

you should try each/all of them on some test disks and figure out which is best for you.

 

[ldcarson]

Hi guys

I have been using an N4100+ with four 750Gb drives on RAID 5 for a few years now and it never ceases to amaze - and frustrate - me just how shockingly slow it is. It takes so long to open a folder of photo thumbnails that I've never got to the end of one - I timed it once and EACH THUMBNAIL TOOK 90 SECONDS TO APPEAR!!! That cannot be right!

Anyway I was doing some research into alternatives for this sorry state of affairs and it turns out that the mobo I installed on my PC last year (MSI P6N SLI Platinum) has the Nvidia MediaShield RAID controller built into it. I was wondering if any of you could advise:
1. what the performance of this controller is like compared to the one on the N4100+? I really can't imagine it could be any worse but would like to check.
2. if I just plug these four drives straight into it and configure the BIOS to point to the array, will it work straight out of the box or will I need to copy all my data off, rebuild the array with the new controller then copy it all back again?

Many thanks in advance you guys
Cheers

I feel your pain. I have 2 Thecus 4100+ Pros. When first purchased I was lucky to get 5mbs throughput on them. I have since upgrade the ram to 1 GB and am running 4 WD 1.5TB drives and have found that 4K is better than 9K for jumbo frame settings. I am hoping that at some point we will be able to put more memory on it, but for now I average between 21-30MB/s throughput on them. Still slow, but better than before. I am currently building a FreeNas Server after playing with WHS V1 and Vail. I have also been looking at Server elements (a type of NAS server OS). My thecus do fine with streamming now so thats what they will be used for, but I want to back up the data on them and have another capability. Good luck with your build!