How do I detect whether my Hard Drive is RAID configured?

Question

I'm not certain if this question makes complete sense. I'm trying to find out if a server is RAID configured. The Device is HP Proliant SCSI, but that's all I know, it's a terabyte drive. I've used PC-Wizard, but I believe it crashed the server (a Kernel Error, according to the Logs)

This may not be necessary for the particular question, but I'll try and frame my question with the experience leading up to asking about this.

I've been trying to monitor performance on a drive and computer that I did not configure. The server is experiencing a lot of WRITELOG waits (about 800 to 900 ms/sec) in Microsoft SQL Server, and since the RAM, and Processors don't seem to have any load, I narrowed he problem down to a Disk bottleneck. I believe the hard disk being used is not optimized for high levels of writes every second. The SQL Checkpoints, occuring every 4 minutes, usually tell me it's running at less than a megabyte per second write speed, with a 30ms latency, around 100 context switches. If the drive had been configured to Raid 0, or O+1 it should be much much faster.

The other thing I noticed was that Disk Queue hovered or averages around 1, occasionally going up to 2, and very occasionally higher (during the SQL Checkpoints)

This leads me to believe only one hard disk spindle is moving around, or if RAID is configured, it must be RAID 1 (mirroring) which means it's not configured for the type of performance I need.

I compared it to another server running a Dell drive, which I was able to determine was RAID configured by using PC-Wizard to check performance.

My SQL Logs stated the checkpoints were running at well over 20 mb/sec, with 0 Latency (less than a millisecond average) And this performance was happening on a server with just as much constant writing, but half the ram, and 4 times less processors.

I need an unobtrusive way to determine whether RAID was configured correctly, without restarting the server to check the BIOS, and without using PC-Wizard. Hopefully there is some way that Windows 2008 Server R2 can detect RAID.

So, Final Question summarized: How do I detect RAID configuration on Windows 2008 Server R2 without using the BIOs, and without PC-Wizard.

Solution

Use HP Array Configuration Utility Software

Comments

[joeqwerty]

You can't, with any degree of certainty, determine if a disk array exists based solely on performance metrics. You need to use whatever disk/array utility is available from the server vendor or the RAID controller vendor.

[meltdownmonk]

This is what I feared. I will need to contact the vendor probably. I don't know if there is a Raid Controller on the computer. I'm not physically in front of the drive either, which further complicates things.

[meltdownmonk]

I literally had the same window open before I checked this. I need to check with a System Admin before I can install anything on the server. I may be able to just ask them about the configuration and what was purchased, rather than trying to make this problem really difficult by putting unusual restrictions on the situation.

[Michael Hampton]

@meltdownmonk If your sysadmins are even halfway competent, it should already be installed.

[meltdownmonk]

I don't believe there was a dedicated system admin on the job for the project. The servers were supposed to arrive on-site pre-configured so all we would need to do is go in and install our software. We don't normally deal with hardware issues since clients are responsible for meeting our minimum requirements. When performance issues started occurring we kept trying to analyze the software instead of checking hardware.