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I have a Windows 2008 R2 AD server operating on my network, it recently ran out of space and I upgraded to 2TB SATA drives instead of the 300GB SAS drives it came with, I configured my 4 drives in RAID-10. I restored operation through the Windows Server Backup feature and everything seemed normal.

Now my workstations are taking a very long time to log on and once on they are taking a very long time to interact with client-side software that communicates data from the server. Sometimes things are taking minutes between communication requests.

Why are things running so very slowly? Thank you for your assistance.

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  • Can you provide some detail on the hardware involved here?
    – ewwhite
    Apr 7, 2016 at 21:01
  • Dell PowerEdge T630. Things were running smoothly before the hard drive upgrade, that change and its repercussions is the relevant factor.
    – user1695505
    Apr 7, 2016 at 21:18

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This could be for any number of reasons, without further information I will be just guessing, firstly I would ask what else is on the server besides AD - because it shouldn't need that much space and its not good practice to put a file server (home directories) or roaming profiles on your AD server, second how does the new partition table compare to the old table, third, is the raid array rebuilding since you restored from a different raid backup. Most importantly, are you monitoring the disk I/O, there are lots of free tools to monitor disk IOPS you should benchmark the array to see what speed you are getting, you could also reboot the server and log into the raid controller to view your virtual disks for any possible errors, check what the write policy is and the block size - all of these things also effect performance - if the server only came with 1 disk then the RAID controller wasn't doing much before.

Can you give the model of the server, the raid card, how the server is configured besides just AD controller and have a look at task manager and see what the disk and network are doing. but to some up - the disk is busy doing something probably RAID 10 was enough to cause the bottle neck, it's much slower than RAID 0

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  • It was previously using 4 300GB SAS drives, the partition table is similar but with an expanded primary partition to 1TB size. I needed this size because this AD server runs server-side software that stores data locally on the AD server's primary partition. I failed to verify the previous configuration of the RAID array in the default configuration of this PowerEdge T630 - but based on 4x300GB drives and only having 450GB available in the partition table I imagined it was RAID-10 previously also.
    – user1695505
    Apr 7, 2016 at 21:24
  • What was the RPM of the old disk vs the new SATA- it will 7.5k ,10k or 15k
    – Sum1sAdmin
    Apr 7, 2016 at 21:29
  • 4 300GB SAS disk in RAID 10 gives 600GB useable storage.
    – Sum1sAdmin
    Apr 7, 2016 at 21:33
  • Previous RPM was 10k, current disk RPM is 7.5k. Perhaps I am misremembering the previous configuration - could there only have been 300GB available with these 4 disks? What configuration would that represent? I am attempting to receive redundancy and performance - I need fault tolerance for 1 disk but I wonder if this server was operating for performance and not fault tolerance previously?
    – user1695505
    Apr 7, 2016 at 21:37
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    I wouldn't be so quick to assume that the slower disks are the cause of your problems. Please check the windows resource monitor, specifically the disk I/O and queue length metrics during a period of time when the symptoms are present. If the disks are bottle-necking your system then you would expect to see a queue length > 0.
    – blacklight
    Apr 7, 2016 at 22:19

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