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Just built system, RAID 0 seems slow

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  • Just built system, RAID 0 seems slow

    Hi,

    First post, hope not too lame...

    I just finished building a system with a Gigabyte GA-8IRXP mobo and P4 1.6 Northwood (WinXP PRO). Set up the onboard Promise Lite 133 with 2 Maxtor 20GB 7200 ATA133 drives as a raid 0 (standard desktop profile (64K chunks)). Everything seems to work great but Sisoft Sandra reports quite a bit slower performance than a comparable ATA 100 setup. and certain operations such Windows Disk Defragmenter hardly work at all (crawls, have yet to finish a defrag).

    Have the latest Promise drivers and IDE cables and connections are correct. Just wondering if I missed something as far as software or other setup issues. XP reports it correctly as one 40 GB drive but I don't see any DMA or other adjustments or parameters.

    Thanks in advance..

    Psee

  • #2
    Could it be XP itself?...not sure i'll leave this one for the guys. Just a thought though, since i've heard how bad XP is from many of my buds that have it. Hope you get your stuff to optimum working order.:)
    - Damien

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    • #3
      have you checked that you have the latest drivers for your raid controler?
      TweakTown SETI@home Team

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      • #4
        I can only speak from my experience with the FastTrak 100 "Lite", but please make sure you have the absolute LATEST drivers for Windows XP - they will speed up your RAID array by a large amount :)

        And there is no DMA option because it is automatically set by the drivers when they are installed :thumb:
        What came first - Insanity or Society?

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        • #5
          Thanks for the tips.

          After some more research seems that many agree the benchmark apps don't take into consideration the stripe size which has a big influence on the overall speed so the scores are not that accurate. The latest released drivers are from November so hopefully the next release should also speed things up in XP.

          After (finally) defragging the drive/s the performance was improved so I guess I'll leave well enough alone. :cheers:

          Thanks again

          Psee

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          • #6
            *slaps self*

            I should have said that... with RAID-0 on my controller, you can choose either AV Editing, Desktop or Server for the stripe size. AV Editing uses a large stripe (good for sustained transfers), Server uses a small stripe size (good for skipping back and forth between small files) and Desktop is somewhere inbetween.

            Also, I was reading a review on Overclockers Australia, and different drives have different performance characteristics when stiped in different sizes. Some perform better with a large stripe, some brands better with a small stripe. Anyway, that review is here.

            Good Luck :wave:
            What came first - Insanity or Society?

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            • #7
              I think (could be wrong) MS released a raid patch for XP dealing with performance issues, at the end of last week.
              Take a look at win update

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              • #8
                Just a quick update...

                After I confirmed the latest Promise FastTrak133 drivers I downloaded the latest Intel chipset and IDE drivers (CD drivers that come with the Gigabyte mobo are out of date) and the Sandra scores are now much higher. They are still not consistent (ranging from 26500 to 37500) but as Albinus noted the stripe size is big factor so I guess Sandra has tough time calculating RAID arrays. :?:

                System is now running great! Now on to tweaking the Geforce 3 Ti 200....:hammer:

                Thx, Psee :thumb:

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