I have a NAS where I have temporarily stored about 2.2TB of data while I rebuilt my “heavy lifter” workstation. My heavy lifter has no SATA on-board, but I use an LSI 9550sx-12 PCI-X RAID card for my on-board RAID-5 array (five drives in total: 3 in array, one hotspare plugged in and one coldspare in drawer). For the first time, I decided to use a SATA drive (on the LSI card, port 0) for my boot drive instead of using an IDE drive (my needs are not great, I don’t need performance all that much).
What I am experiencing now, however, is a great big problem: When I transfer my data back onto my RAID-5 array (my D: drive, newly created with brand new drives), it is completely soaking my main boot drive (my C: drive) -- 100% active time, almost 0kb/s disk transfer rate. Why?
None of the other single drives attached to the LSI card (E:, temp storage; F:, a staging drive for BitTorrent and other duties) are being soaked -- only the boot drive. This is causing massive latency in almost every running program, as my main boot drive is almost completely unresponsive until the data transfer is finished. Plus, the drive doesn’t get soaked until about 2-5 minutes into the transfer, and remains soaked until about 2-5 minutes after the data has completed being transferred to my D: drive (the data transfer window shuts down).
FYI, I am using Windows 8. Just as an experiment, nothing more.