RAID0 on motherboard's SATA not as fast as expected

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Jack Kelly

New Member
Sep 28, 2019
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Hi. Forgive the newbie question!

I have an 8 x 12TB disk Zfs RAID0 array running on the motherboard's SATA connectors on an AMD X399 motherboard. Read speeds top out at about 800 MB/sec. This is slower than I expected. Each disk can sustain over 200 MB/sec so the RAID0 array should, in theory, deliver 1600 MB/sec. But I'm getting half that.

Is the bottleneck the motherboard's SATA connectors?

The X399 chipset is connected to the CPU via 4 lanes of PCIe gen 3 (which can sustain about 4 GB/sec). But perhaps the X399 just doesn't have enough grunt to handle over 800 MB/sec?

Do I need to upgrade to a proper HBA to get closer to 1600 MB/sec?! Or is the bottleneck ZFS?
 
Last edited:

Jack Kelly

New Member
Sep 28, 2019
2
0
1
After upgrading the motherboard's BIOS from F1 to F2g, the read speeds for a 8-disk striped ZFS array are now 1.5 GB/sec! Yay.

(BTW, don't worry, I'll be using these disks as a RAID-Z2 array, not striped! I was just playing with the striping to see the maximum performance :) )