RAID-5 analysis speed, 4 disks

[Jouko]

I have 4x1.5TB RAID-5 system with RAID parameters mixed up. When moving from old motherboard to new one, something in the RAID settings went wrong. The disks themselves are healthy.

My new motherboard has an Intel i7 processor (3.2GHz) and 16MB of fast memory - so, with 7200RPM disks the system should be quite fast. Now, iRecover demo version has analyzed the disks for a day and tade it to 6% (!) - screenshot attached. A few notes:

 1) CPU load seems not to be correct. If iRecover reports 20%, Windows Task Manager (and Resource Monitor) show 4-5%;

 2) Most of the time iRecover indicates read speed of around 4.5MB/sec. This is less than 10% of what some other recovery applications get (according to Windows Resource Monitor);

 3) Sometimes (maybe once in 20 minutes) read speed jumps to around 30MB/sec for a while (maybe for a minute or so).

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) and my disks are Seagate's ST31500341AS.

I have Gigabyte G1.Assassin2 motherboard. My antivirus is disabled.

At the moment iRecover seems fairly slow to me, but maybe there's something that could be done differently?

[Joep]

Hello,

If the disks are not having to go through something slow like USB there isn't a lot more you can do right now. At this point it seems to be finding lots of data, which is good. Both caches set to max isn't useful, it's not even a good idea as it will not gain anything but still use precious memory (which is limited to 4GB for 32 bit applications even if you have 16GB).

[Jouko]

I have the disks connected via SATA-2 interface. The previous time I had to make recovery, using SATA connections worked OK. Also - I think - 4MB/sec is not very high figure. Sometimes also iRecover speeds up, so I wonder if there's some strange behaviour going on...

[Tom]

Even if that is the case we can't check that from here. All you can do is check the hardware and make sure connections are correct (which also means that communications protocols for the controller/disks can be checked, making sure that it all runs at full speed).
Also keep in mind that iRecover is not just reading, there is also analysis and calculation going on.
Set the caches back to their default values, that too may help.