slow RAID5 array?

[dboy]

So I set up a new RAID5 array (using a LSI i4 raid card, aka the Dell CERC/PERC ATA100/4ch card) with 7x Maxtor 200gig IDE drives. 6 of the 7 are brand new, one is about a year old.

It's up and running, looks fine. I started moving all the data from all over back to it (it's my DVD and tv archive on the file server). There's about 500gig of data to move back, spread across 3 external hard drives (connected to the server) and 3 other computers.

I started copying stuff from a couple sources at a time, not from all 6. According to my calcs, it should take somewhere around 7 hours to do 500gig if the array is maxed out (Sandra rated it at 22MG/s - I'm assuming it meant megabyte and not bit)

It's been running now for close to 40 hours and is only about 3/5 done. Is something seriously wrong here? I don't remember it taking this long to move all the data off!

The server is running a Duron 1700ish IIRC, 512 ram, etc. It's got a separate OS drive on the onboard IDE channel.

I've got the same raid card in a similar setup (although only 4x200gig drives) in another computer. Sandra rated it at 17, so they're in the same ballpark.

I've got sys restore and indexing turned off on the array. Anything else I'm missing?

 

[Agamar]

Raid 5 is pretty darn slow with Write speed. The read speed is much better. A caching hardware RAID controller might be a bit faster, but with IDE drives you are probably not going to see very good speeds. Still, it should be faster than that. I assume you have done all the checks as far as DMA transfers and block mode in the BIOS and Hardware Properties.