Striped SSDs not looking so fly [again]

[VirtualRain]

I've used Quickbench, AJA, and Drive Genius to run tests.

The IO part is really just a guess on my part.

All these benchmarks can cause KP? If it was just one, I would ignore it as a likely software issue. If they all do it, I'd be concerned it's an issue with the SW RAID interacting with the drives.

I'm not sure what to suggest... AFAIK there are several people running Vertex2 in SW RAID0. Perhaps strip your system down to just bare essentials... remove all other drives and peripherals and start trying to isolate the problem. Run a single, dual and 3x RAID0 set to see if one of the drives is at fault?

 

[nanofrog]

Okay, after running this for a day, I've experienced 4 kernel panics.

I have attributed them to the Apple RAID…

Basically if I try to read or write too much data to the RAID on the ICH, it will cause a KP.

This does not happen on any other drives and it does not happen in Windows. It also only started after installing the SSDs on the ICH.

Is this suppose to happen? Am I hitting an IO bottleneck which causes the KPs?

Could you clarify; are the disks now on the ICH and the RAID is implemented via Disk Utility?

 

[alphaod]

Could you clarify; are the disks now on the ICH and the RAID is implemented via Disk Utility?

Now they are now directed to connected to the backplane on the motherboard and therefore the ICH. I have configured then into a RAID0 with a 128Kb block size via Disk Utility.

So yes.

 

[nanofrog]

Now they are now directed to connected to the backplane on the motherboard and therefore the ICH. I have configured then into a RAID0 with a 128Kb block size via Disk Utility.

So yes.

OK, thanks.

Now are you still having problems?

 

[alphaod]

OK, thanks.

Now are you still having problems?

I took the machine to the Apple Store. They told to uninstall PGP WDE… that seems to have to alleviated the issue.

If it's good for a week, I'l reinstall WDE and see if the issue returns.

 

[philipma1957]

I took the machine to the Apple Store. They told to uninstall PGP WDE… that seems to have to alleviated the issue.

If it's good for a week, I'l reinstall WDE and see if the issue returns.

so with it working now what are your speeds?

 

[nanofrog]

I took the machine to the Apple Store. They told to uninstall PGP WDE… that seems to have to alleviated the issue.

If it's good for a week, I'l reinstall WDE and see if the issue returns.

You never mentioned drive encryption.... oops.

That definitely can have a negative effect when used with RAID (as does MacDrive; not sure about Paragon, but as it's similar to MacDrive, I wouldn't be surprised).

At any rate, I hope your speeds are where they should be, and please keep us posted (problems or not). : )

 

[deconstruct60]

Here's the weird part. I have 2GB of cache with write back enabled (with a battery). So I would assume any write less than 2GB in size would mean really fast speeds since everything is being dumped into what is essentially a RAM disk.

why would 100% of the cache be solely for writes? Unless the design or read write patten is whacked there going to be a decent percentage of reads present too ( e.g., the parity blocks and the data that helped produced the data being written. )

Every RAID 5/6 write invokes multiple reads as well as multiple writes.

 

[alphaod]

so with it working now what are your speeds?

Still the same… slow 450MB/s write and 600MB/s read on ICH.

You never mentioned drive encryption.... oops.

That definitely can have a negative effect when used with RAID (as does MacDrive; not sure about Paragon, but as it's similar to MacDrive, I wouldn't be surprised).

At any rate, I hope your speeds are where they should be, and please keep us posted (problems or not). : )

Actually my drives are not encrypted; I just have PGP installed because I use it for my emails. So for now I won't. PGP WDE was just part of my license; what I meant was it was available, but again my drives were not encrypted.

why would 100% of the cache be solely for writes? Unless the design or read write patten is whacked there going to be a decent percentage of reads present too ( e.g., the parity blocks and the data that helped produced the data being written. )

Every RAID 5/6 write invokes multiple reads as well as multiple writes.

That's why I said less than 2GB; anyways, there is bound to be some programming in the RAM, and whatnot; even a 200MB write was too slow on that card.

 

[nanofrog]

Actually my drives are not encrypted; I just have PGP installed because I use it for my emails. So for now I won't. PGP WDE was just part of my license; what I meant was it was available, but again my drives were not encrypted.

OK. Didn't think about using it exclusively for email.

 

[alphaod]

OK. Didn't think about using it exclusively for email.

No problem. Not many folks these days use PGP for their emails either. It's kind of disappointing.