The transfer rate is too slow. You should be getting 12+ on writes to the array, and 40+ on reads from the array. I wouldn't think it worthwhile to add druves until you resolve this.

Any speculations to why it is slow? I'm running a AMD Opteron 148 2.2ghz with a gig of ram which is under the recommended 3.0 ghz. Maybe its time for me to upgrade!

8Mb/sec is not horribly slow for writes.  Many of us get ~10Mb/sec.  However, even if you do think of it as a problem, the CPU and memory are not likely the problem.

 

Typical problems are drives not properly recognized by the BIOS, overloaded PCI buses, and not using GigE.

 

 

Bill

With only 2 drives, overloading of the PCI bus seems very unlikely, unless a parity check or build is running the background.  The Gb lan might be a problem - but even then 8 seems pretty darn slow.  Before the blanket incident the array was evidently running pretty fast, so that also adds to the sense that something is wrong.

 

cnv, is it possible that a parity check or build is running in the background?

 

You might want to experiment with another drive - even a single DATA drive without parity assigned might give useful results.  (MAKE SURE YOU DON'T ACCIDENTLY ASSIGN A DATA DRIVE TO THE PARITY SLOT!)

 

You should be getting 40+ write transfer rates without parity.