View Full Version : Brand new Barracuda 7200.12s tanking performance
Newegg just shipped me a pair of 7200.12s (http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148433) which I promptly configured in to RAID 0 and threw my OS image on. Installed drivers, installed matrix raid utility and turned on write back cache.
However, they're noticeably noisier than the other six hard drives I've got... combined, and I HD Tach shows their performance at 22mb/s peak, closer to 12mb/s at the end of the physical disk.
Could I have screwed something up or are they just boned?
Marshmallow64
12-18-09, 11:47 AM
I do not think these drives were that good in speed. I suggest you go with the WD Black 1 TB. A little bit more pricey but better performance.
EarthDog
12-18-09, 11:59 AM
In R0 those drives should likely be posting close to 200MB/s+ at the begining of the drive. Were you missing a zero?
http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=1526&pageID=6598
I totally wasn't missing a zero. I wouldn't have believed it myself except that my comp kept freezing up due to obvious HDD latency during all the driver installs. Explorer going "Not Responding" over and over as things tried to install.
After a reboot, I did an HD Tach and got those numbers.
EarthDog
12-18-09, 12:11 PM
Can you attacha screenshot via the forums of an HD Tach run please... Something isnt right for sure...
http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/1066/hdtach1.jpg (http://img20.imageshack.us/i/hdtach1.jpg/)
EarthDog
12-18-09, 12:22 PM
You attached externally, I cant see those from the office... sorry.
I don't understand, how can I attach "internally"?
Try this:
My original disks in RAID 0 (functioning correctly):
http://kivin.ca/filebin/?file=hd_bench_raid0nZJ1.jpg
My new disks in RAID 0:
http://kivin.ca/filebin/?file=hdtach11d3Qa.jpg
EarthDog
12-18-09, 12:35 PM
I see them and wow is that low.. holy crap. Thats a tenth of what a SINGLE drive would do.
Write back cache enabled?
Its setup in the BIOS as RAID correct?
Write back enabled.
Setup in the BIOS is identical on those two screen shots. I never went back in the BIOS and changed anything between them.
Is your stripe size is set at 256KB or larger? I had a similar issue. Setting the stripe size to 128K transformed the system from impossibly slow to reasonably fast.
If that is not it, I'd recommend breaking the array and running HDD diags. There should be no reason for that pitiful performance.
visbits
12-18-09, 01:48 PM
The 7200.12 1TB will sustain 100MB/s each. Somethings wrong there.
I think I'm just going to return them to Newegg and get a pair of Caviar blacks.
Thanks to neweggs horrible customer care, I may end up having to eat the cost of the dead drive(s).
Does anyone have experience creating an RMA on their website? I can't get their website to serve up a UPS shipping label. Been giving errors for inside of a week and now my RMA is due to expire before I can even get it on a truck on its way back to egg. Customer service basically just said I'm boned.
---
In an effort to figure out which disk is faulty, I plugged them in individually using my eSATA external enclosure, formatted them, and ran an HD Tach. Here's the results:
http://kivin.ca/filebin/?file=7200.12_disk29NJ0.jpg
http://kivin.ca/filebin/?file=7200.12_disk10F2f.jpg
BossBorot
12-19-09, 04:47 PM
I've never done raid 0 so I cant help you in that regard but those eSATA pics clearly show that the drives are in working order. They could transfer higher then that but are being bottlenecked by your eSATA controller. The problem had to be with your raid 0 config
Mr Alpha
12-19-09, 05:15 PM
It looks like they are running in PIO mode.
I'm concerned about the CPU Utilization. If they're EACH taking a third of my CPU... ! Gods, it isn't surprising they're causing a bottleneck when synched up in RAID.
Could someone please elaborate on what Mr Alpha said?
ninja edit:
After reading a little, Mr Alpha is right... it sure sounds like PIO. Could it be a BIOS setting? It puzzles me that I park my new hard disks on the same SATA channels that my old ones were plugged in to and they tank out, then I put the old ones back in and they work fine.
BossBorot
12-19-09, 07:21 PM
it might be a jumper setting on the drives themselves. I remember there was a jumper setting on the 7200.10 back in the day so I wouldn't be surprised if there where jumpers on your drives.
Checked, no jumpers.
I don't know what I did but I had the disks working correctly individually. They were at 2% CPU utilization with 100.2 MB/s performance in HD Tach /w 250 MB bursts. I placed them back in RAID 0 to see if I could keep the performance and it's caused my main RAID volume (mirroring) to start initializing. My whole system is running like poo while it does this.
--
Whatever I've done, it worked:
http://kivin.ca/filebin/?file=7200.12_raid0IMD2.jpg
I wish I knew what did it. Afraid, now, that they'll decide to crap out again.
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