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I have been getting some weird HDTach results on my RAID 0 array. The speed is extremely inconsistent, and I haven't been able to produce this behavior on any IDE drive configurations. The maximum transfer rate I get is quite high, but the minimum transfer rate is extremely low (approx. 1400k/sec). Please go here for my RAID configuration (click on the numbers on the first image to see additional information) and the HDTach results: http://www.zbattle.net/raid These inconsistencies have caused problems on many games, but most noticably in Neverwinter Nights, because it streams the world from the hard drive. The game stutters as I move around the world as a result. If anyone can shed some light as to why this is happening, it would be greatly appreciated. Here are my system specs: Abit KD7-RAID (VIA KT400) Athlon XP 2600+ 512MB PC2100 DDR RAM 2xWD1200JB RAID Array (mode 0) eVGA GeForce4 Ti4600 (8xAGP) Windows XP Professional w/ SP1 Latest BIOS w/ latest HPT BIOS Latest VIA 4in1 drivers Latest nVidia Detonators (44.03) Thanks, Ian

Quote: This is a fairly known problem between Highpoint RAID controllers and Neverwinter Nights. Goes back six months or more. Go to the Bioware forums and read for yourself. Bioware blames Highpoint ... Highpoint blames Bioware. Nothing has been done. There is NO fix. There were about six or so folks complaining about it, me included. We tried everything under the sun, nothing worked except switching controllers. Doesnt matter if you use RAID or not under the Highpoints, still lags. Sorry ..... Thanks for the info! Fortunately, someone posted a fix for it on the NWN forums and I no longer experience that problem. However, the HDTach benchmark results still remain. Does anyone know if this is normal behavior or should I be concerned that something is wrong with my setup? Thanks, Ian

Quote: Can you try setting your swap file to a fixed size? I think 1.5x your memory should be fine (768MB). Reboot and give it a try. It already is a fixed size (768MB) Quote: Also, disable any virus protection (sigh-I know, I know), any disk defragmenters if scheduled, and other unnecessary items in the system tray. When I performed the benchmark and ran NWN, I only had about 9 processes running (all of them necessary for Windows to run properly). I also defragmented my hard drive before trying either. Quote: Have you reloaded your system from scratch? If not, I would recommend that you ghost your image to a temporary location (server or another HD) and reinstall XP, your VIA chipset driver first, then the remaining drivers. I would then ghost it again to a temp location on another PC so that you have a fresh image in case you ever need it. I would then install Neverwinter Nights and see if it still occurs. It's done the same thing ever since I set up my RAID array (and incidentally performed a clean install of Windows XP). So, it's not something that developed over time. Quote: If so, take the one of your drives out of the array, plug the other into the standard IDE slot, then pull the image back down to it and see what happens. Not sure what you mean by this.. how can I use the drives independently when they have been formatted to work as an array? Quote: Still laggy, then try it with the other hard drive. This could even be from faulty memory, faulty memory slot, or even excessive paging. Hope this helps. I also have a WD400BB drive connected to a Promise ATA/133 PCI card and it doesn't exhibit this type of behavior in HDTach or NWN. Thanks, Ian

Quote: http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/ Check out the Via latency patches. Not sure if the KT400 still need it but these really improved scores on a KT333. Thanks, but it didn't help =/

I've been having a lot of trouble with intro movies in some games ever since I got my new motherboard (or maybe vid card, I got them at almost the same time, so I'm not sure which is causing it). I first noticed the problem in Battlefield 1942. The EA Logo movie stuttered for the first second or so, and so did the second logo (can't remember the name). The game intro movie ran fine, however. I didn't really see this stuttering as much of a problem since it was only in the two logo movies and I hadn't experienced anything like this in any other game. That is until I tried to play Command and Conquer Generals. Also an EA game, the EA logo movie stuttered horribly in this game. Though in this game, the game intro movie also stutters (with sound going in and out every second or so). Even the mission briefings (shown while the mission is loading) stutter horribly. After this, I was sure it was a problem with EA games because I hadn't experienced anything like this in other games (such as Warcraft 3). That was until last night, when I installed Freelancer. One odd thing that happened when I ran this game is it told me it could not recognize my video card. Odd since I have a GeForce4 Ti4600 8xAGP with the lastest detonators (43.45). I clicked OK to continue anyway and then it went to the Microsoft logo movie which, to my surprise, stuttered quite a bit. Though this time it was only the sound that stuttered. The second logo movie and the game intro movie also stuttered. Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else has ran into this problem and/or might be able to offer a solution. Here are my system specs: Windows XP Professional w/ SP1 DirectX 9.0a Athlon XP 2600+ (333 FSB) ABIT KD7-RAID (VIA KT400 chipset) 512MB PC2100 DDR RAM eVGA GeForce4 Ti4600 (8x AGP) Sound Blaster 512 2x 120GB HDD (WD1200JB) RAID Array (striping) Lite-On CD-RW 24x10x40 So far I have tried using the on-board sound (AC'97) and turning down the sound hardware acceleration in dxdiag (on both sound devices). Neither of which had any effect. If I am unable to resolve this problem I will probably buy another motherboard with an nForce2 chipset.

Quote: NTFS still fragments... Not sure why you thought differently. I doubt that disabling ACPI will do anything but cause more problems for you. Not as much as FAT. I'm sure that's not it anyway, because I can play the videos fine with Bink's RAD Tools (the C&C Generals videos are in .bik format). Quote: Did you try installing the latest Creative drivers? IIRC, Via+Creative=Some incompatibilities. Anyway, give us an update. I have installed all the latest drivers for all my hardware.

Quote: How about checking your disk defragmentation? Just a thought, as all the other bases seem to have been covered. I doubt that would be it since I'm using NTFS. Anyway, someone in another board suggested that it is because I am using APIC and my sound card is not APIC compliant. So I need to disable it in my BIOS and do a repair install of Windows XP. Thanks for everyone's help.

Quote: first of all make sure you have the latest drivers and patches for all software and games. Tried it. Quote: then check for a bios update with abit. A new bios update for my motherboard was just released a few weeks ago. I flashed my bios with it and still no luck. Quote: if its a via chipset put the latest 4in1s on. Already installed. Quote: have you played in the bios with the agp settings? if not try a few settings and see what happens. I tried playing around with them, but I wasn't quite sure what I was doing. I've tried the Fail-Safe bios settings, Optimized bios settings, and I've tried using the recommended settings from my eVGA GeForce4 Ti4600 manual. Quote: turn off wait for virtical sync. I'm not sure how this would help, but I tried it anyway and still no luck.

Well, I don't think it's caused by either of those because the games work fine on my friend's computer and the movies are stored on my hard drive.

I've been experiencing extremely low performance with my on-board HighPoint HPT372 RAID controller. Below are my system specs: Windows XP Professional (non-SP1) Abit KD7-RAID AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (333) 512MB PC2100 DDR RAM nVidia GeForce3 Ti200 Master on IDE 3 (RAID): Maxtor 20GB HDD (92049U6) ATA/66 Slave on IDE 3 (RAID): Western Digital 120GB HDD (WD1200JB) ATA/100 Master on IDE 4 (RAID): Western Digital 40GB HDD (WD400BB) ATA/100 I have tested each HDD on PC Mark 2002, and have achieved an average score of 400 on the HDD benchmark. I have the latest VIA 4in1 drivers installed, the latest HPT372 drivers, and my BIOS is flashed to the most current revision (CY). I am using the IDE cables that came with the motherboard. That's about all I can think of that would pertain to this problem. When I connected the drives to IDE 1 and 2, they were much faster, but I did not benchmark them in that situation. Though the speed difference was definitely noticable. Any help on this matter is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Well, I just bought another WD1200JB (120GB) HDD. I'm going to stripe them together and see what kind of performance I can get. Also, I followed your instructions (Newumbrella) on up[censored] my HPT372 BIOS, and it worked perfectly. Now my CPU Utilization on HD Tach is approx. 10%. Thank you very much for that info. I'll report back my findings of the 2xWD1200JB array to this thread.

Well, I ran HDTach on all three of my drives (in the same configuration), and I got some pretty interesting results. Maxtor 20GB: http://www.zbattle.net/maxtor.gif WD 40GB: http://www.zbattle.net/wd400bb.gif WD 120GB: http://www.zbattle.net/wd1200jb.gif It appears that the WD 120GB got some pretty decent speeds, though it lagged quite a bit giving it a really low minimum result. I suspect that this is because this drive is paired with the slow Maxtor. Something that really bothered me in these tests was the CPU Utilization. Out of all three drives it was an average of 53%, which is insanely high. Though, I suspect this is because I am using HPT372 BIOS version 2.32, which I hear is the culprit for this behaviour. Newumbrella mentioned that I could update my HPT372 BIOS to version 2.34 by embedding the update into the Abit BIOS image, but I don't really know how this is done (except that you need to use CBROM). If anyone knows how to properly perform this patch, please e-mail me or reply to this thread. Quote: * Now, I don't know if the HPT-372 is more "modern" & can address disks of diff. rpm, &/or ATA-66/100 rating or not, on SAME CABLE... but that's ANOTHER ISSUE TO CONSIDER! I.E.-> Since I heard more modern EIDE controllers can now do this & address disks @ their TRUE speed even if on same cable (& are indeed, diff. speed drives in either ATA-66/100 rating, OR IDE vs. EIDE OR even 5400rpm vs. 7200rpm ratings)! This I only heard recently in fact here @ this site on these forums only days ago... Truthfully/QUITE HONESTLY, hearing that was a SURPRISE to me in fact, that a weakness of single-threaded I/O controllers in the IDE/EIDE world have overcome this weakness fairly recently in more modern controllers for them! It's good news, & seemed to be supported well by those that spoke of it to me, & they had documentation & support as well. Plus, were I looking @ it programmatically? It wouldn't be impossible to tag each channel's devices in their datastreams with a (on EIDE channel #1) "I am 100 ATA & hit me @ this speed" & on EIDE channel # 2 if need be, & it is slower "I am 66 ATA & hit me @ this speed ONLY"... (Now, as far as MY HPT-370 RAID controller circuit here? Like yourself, I did not see it doing that here, being able to address diff. speed disks on the same cables on it @ their TRUE max speeds, but instead saw them operating only as fast as what seemed like slowest devices on their cables!) Now.. & from the sounds of it there, the same issue exists still for you that the SLOWEST DISKS on a controller chain on these HighPoint RAID controllers lag you... & the fastest disks do NOT seem to be addressed @ their TRUE MAX SPEEDS!) From what I can tell the HPT372 does allow a drive to operate independently of the drive it is sharing a channel with, but it does cause some lag that ultimately reduces the overall performance of the drive. However, this could be due to the fact that I am using HPT372 BIOS version 2.32. Quote: * What I want to know though, on your end is, did you use EIDE cables with 80 pins on them, OR did you use std, 50 pin IDE cables that you said came with your mobo... again, this DOES matter! I am quite sure I am using 80 pin cables, but I'll try to find out for sure and get back to you. Is there an easy way to tell? I noticed that I have some older IDE cables and its individual wires looks much bigger than the ones for the IDE cables I'm using now (there are a lot more individual wires on my new ones). So I would think that if there are only two types of IDE cables, I am using the 80-pin versions.

Hey AlecStaar, thanks for the input. I am planning on buying another WD1200JB (120GB) and ditching the smaller two drives (or I'll just put them on my Promise ATA/133 PCI controller), so that should speed things up. If I were to do that, should I run the two 120GB drives separate or should I stripe them? Which would be faster? Edit: on a side note, earlier I mentioned that my WD 40GB (ATA100) was probably going slow because it was paired with the Maxtor 20GB (ATA66), but I just realized that the WD 120GB is paired with the Maxtor! So, does that mean I will get better performance on the WD 120GB if I switched it with the WD 40GB (so that it's on its own IDE channel)?

Hey Newumbrella, I am at work right now so I cannot benchmark my drives with HDTach for another 5 hours or so. I have a burner and a dvd drive attached to IDE 1 and 2. Actually, I did not benchmark the 120GB as I thought I did, and I tried it last night and got 800 in PCMark 2002 on it. So, the other hard drives are probably just a bit slower. Although, like you said the Maxtor is probably slowing down the WD 40GB drive because it is on the same channel. The thing that confuses me is that I used to get much better performance when I had the same drives on the main IDE channels (1 and 2). I never benchmarked them with that set up, but it was noticably faster. I would think that the HPT372, acting as an ATA controller, would offer better performance. Also, I am using the HPT 2.32 driver because the BIOS only has the HPT372 controller flashed to 2.32. So... no problems there. I found that tool, CBROM, but I'm a little afraid to use it. If you could give me instructions on how to properly update the Abit BIOS image to contain the new HPT372 2.34 BIOS, it would be much appreciated. I'll try HDTach when I get home and let you know how that goes. Thanks for the help.

Quote: look is there is a jumper to switch the controller from raid to ata function. No.. it's an on-board controller. It acts as an ATA controller if you don't set up any RAID arrays. From my motherboard manual: "KD7-RAID's built-in HighPoint HPT 372 chipset gives you the capability to support Ultra DMA 133. It provides two IDE channels (IDE3 & IDE4) that also support Ultra DMA 133 specifications, and it allows for four additional IDE devices in your computer system."

Well, thanks for the info jdulmage. Any idea if I can connect ATAPI devices to this RAID controller? I'm guessing the anwer is no, but please humor me =]

Well, I'm really just trying to use them as extra IDE channels (not striping or mirroring). So if I were to connect a single drive (say, the 120GB drive) to the RAID controller, I would get much higher performance?