NIC issue

[MartinC]

I have recently had a new PC built for me, and had a second NIC installed:

Edimax EN-9260TXE

I am running windows 8.1 on the system and it seems the NIC is behaving odd, if I start to copy something it will start at 80-90 MB/s but after a random short period it will drop to 10-20 MB/s and stay there, which is dreadful.

In this particular instance (which is temp) this NIC is plugged into a new temp Netgear 10/100/1000 8 port switch.

The other NIC is plugged into a larger switch and performs fine.

I did initially have an issue with the NIC disappearing from device manager completely, but that was due to power management, which was quickly turned off, and returned after a restart of the host.

I am still investigating but in the mean time I thought I would post on here to see if anyone has come across this before?

[neilcritc]

for the cost id replace the nic with another branded product

[evilsatan]

Have you tried other drivers and also changed the advanced settings of the card in device manager to see if jumbo frames etc. are configured?

[burner1]

Can you check the MTU setting on the switch? As Evil says, enable 9k in Jumbo settings for the card in device manager (I'm running windows 8.1 and jumbo setting was disabled by default so the MTU (maximum transmission unit = data packets) was very low. If you have the option to change MTU on the switch, up that as well.

[Over Carl]

I assume you have tried with other switches/cables? I assume you are using Cat5e or above, not just regular Cat 5

I don't trust any NIC 100% unless it is a gigabit or faster intel.

Also please note that even with for example gig intel on both sides, you may not get sustained max throughput on regular quality switches.

To get proper wire speed on all ports simultaneously you need a switch which specifically says it is "non blocking" but you don't find these even at the lower end of commercial grade kit.

But then the final reason I have determined is just that windows can be shit. Try performing disk to disk copy on the same machine (not over lan). If you get similar strange anomalies we need to consider the PC rather than the LAN.

[MartinC]

It seems I was a little premature with my diagnoses of the issue, after some more testing I have come to the conclusion it is the raid that is causing the performance issue.

I have a Sabertooth Z97 mark 2 MB, with 5x 3TB WD RED disks in a raid 5, and also a 250GB SSD, the issue occurs as above if I am copying to the RAID 5, but if I copy the same data across the same interfaces it runs much faster and does not drop all of sudden if I am coping to the SSD.

I am a little confused about this performance, as I would not expect such behaviour from new disks in a RAID 5 on a new MB, does anyone have any clue to what might be causing this?

[evilsatan]

I'm pretty new to proper raid but is that fake raid on the mobo or is there a proper controller? I had always used fake/software raid before but having researched I found out there are performance issues so I have bought an HP P222 raid controller for my new ESXi server, I am yet to run tests but the performance should be much better.

[MartinC]

Its the controller on the MB, it is not a full raid card, but I did not expect such poor performance like that.

I might wipe it all out and turn into RAID 0, but I have other workstations with the raid on the motherboard and its performance is no where near that bad.

[Over Carl]

Firstly it may be worth booting a few Linux live CDs (often however drivers for the latest kit are not available or pretty poor in Linux).

This may be interesting to help determine whether the issue is with the RAID (controller/drive/cables/mobo/backplane) or with Windows just being shit sometimes.


Sorry but in imho fakeraid is junk that is only good for mirrors, not stripes. Even then raid 1 mirrors can still cause massive disappointment. e.g. I remember going to a site with a screwed server which had fakeraid (Dell I think it was an CERC S100). Within seconds a real raid controller would mark the bad drive as failed/offline but allow file access to continue on the full data set at approx. full speed.

That shitty pile of crap decided it had a drive that sprung a million errors overnight should still be kept as a member of the RAID meaning it took something lilke 2 hrs just to boot the server, then the fileshares were available but performance was so poor they were practical unusable.

I went to site and removed the dead drive and everything went back to normal. Went back next evening with another drive and kicked off a rebuild and we were done the next day.

With a real RAID controller, dead drive would be offline immediate, and the controller or host would probably be able to send SNMP data informing a monitoring system that a drive has failed and needs to be replaced as a matter of urgency.

Going ot now a little, if you really want to go ott, you get a spare raid controller even same firmware type as the original, and consider whether caches between these cars are swappable is you have an environment where any dataloss is simply not an option. Then the other thing to do if going OTT is order all the drives to be members of the RAID as separate orders confirming they are all from different batches just to cut the chance of you getting stunk by a dead batch of drives.
Sorry if I've gone ott, but you seem like the kind of fella who would be interested in different ideas and approaches.

[evilsatan]

It's not often I see a fake raid controller that offers raid 5, usually they are limited to raid0/1 like with the HP Microservers because of the processing power required. I'm not sure what my ReadyNAS Ultra 4 has but it was expensive so I assume there is a raid controller as its in raid5.

[Over Carl]

The rough rule of thumb is that if it cost less than £40 per port when brand new, there is no chance it will be real RAID. Seeing a decent size heatsink normally confirms the board actually has it's own processor for the XOR calcs heavily used by higher RAID levels rather than offloading to main CPU, although obviously it's best to confirm by looking into any particular card.

Just for example Intel Matrix RAID supported 0/1/5. However I remember being extremely disappointed with a RAID 5 set using that.

[MartinC]

Well I gave the company I brought it from a call to see if they have anything to say, they are going source the same hardware in their lab and see if the same thing happens.

They are initallly talking about it could be a faulty mb, and might end up replacing it.

Think I will continue trying to investigate too, I read some stuff on Inteli power which also might be an option.

Will let you know what they find and come back with.

The most annoying thing is I have copied 8TB of data on to it and looks like I might have to do it again now.

[Over Carl]

Sorry my concentration hasn't been 100% recently - I doubt you will ever get good RAID 5 writes with your onboard. I can't say I've ever come across a mobo with real RAID 5 onboard.

I know how you feel about moving the RAID but from a different angle.

For ages I've planned to setup a massive file server at home, but I don't want to start loading it up until I've actually fully loaded it with drives and created a massive RAID volume rather than gradually increasing it.

End result is I've completely lost 3 drives worth of data while I still dream about my optimal setup

[evilsatan]

Sorry my concentration hasn't been 100% recently - I doubt you will ever get good RAID 5 writes with your onboard. I can't say I've ever come across a mobo with real RAID 5 onboard.

I know how you feel about moving the RAID but from a different angle.

For ages I've planned to setup a massive file server at home, but I don't want to start loading it up until I've actually fully loaded it with drives and created a massive RAID volume rather than gradually increasing it.

End result is I've completely lost 3 drives worth of data while I still dream about my optimal setup

That's what annoys me with RAID, you can't just add drives to an existing array can you? With my new setup I have an external port on the P222 so will add a separate external RAID5 array when I need space.

[MartinC]

I can confirm that the performance is very poor with RAID 5 with the onboard, so I have swapped to raid 0, as a raid 10 would lose to much disk space for my liking.

Correct, I have yet to come across any raid cards that allow you to add additional disks to an existing raid, some SAN have similar abilities but I am a little old school when it comes to setting up raids, and always like to create them from scratch.

Thanks for all the help and advice, its not ended up ideal, but it will have to do as I did not fancy spending an extra 400-500 on a raid card for this server.

What I did do though, is to create a 2 disk raid 0 and a 3 disk raid 0, so no single disk will lose all the data in one hit so that should help.