RAID XP w/ Promise o/b A7V133 - results/contrasts here pleas

[Papercup 0]

Hi Guys,

 

I have recently been using the Promise Controller onboard my Asus A7V133 in its full use as a RAID controller. I have got my hands on 2 of the Dodgy Deskstars, the IBM DTLA-307030 75GXPs, the 30Gb 7200rpm ATA100 ones that won all those awards for being the fastest ever and then started making clunky clunky scrape scrape noises all over the world.

 

I ran the HP firmware update on them and it said it had been a success, then I ran the IBM Drive Fitness Test and low-level formatted and ran full tests on both. They have not made a sound since, and perform very well. But I digress.

 

I attached them to the board, both as master, both to their own channel. I ran XP from its CD and after a lot of poncing around with floppies chose one partition of 58.7Gb and had to make it NTFS (found out why a moment ago on another forum but that is another story still).

 

I had to use the floppy that was provided with the motherboard CD (you copy the directory from the CD onto a floppy and put that in when you hit F6) so I only had the choice when prompted of either NT or 2000 driver. Obviously I chose the 2000. It installed normally (but quickly) and runs like a dream, extremely quickly and I can heartily recommend it.

 

I remember when I ran one of these Deskstars (a 30, like these) in WinMe and 98 and I got Sandra scores around 23000. I also used to get about 17000 in 2000. I now get 32000 in XP. I would expect to get the same in 2000 with this stripe so I have effectively almost doubled my disk speeds in 2000/XP.

 

A few things for those who have done the same: has anyone done this in 98 or ME? I would love to know Sandra speeds. Not that I would dream of going back to 9X, but just as a matter of interest.

 

The other thing; every single time i reboot i get the little popup window that you get when you install new hardware. It says that 'Promise Filter Driver' has been stopped from loading as it would have made the system unstable. I am not worried about this as it isn't unstable, and it is in fact extremely fast, much quicker than a single drive (I used to run a single 15Gb Deskstar, same model). Anyone know which part of the Promise stuff is this 'filter driver'? Can i knobble its attempts at loading? Or get a new version?

 

And last of all (I think): is there an XP version of the Promise driver for this mainboard? I can't find one on the Asus site, and Promise won't provide one as it is an oem onboard solution, nothing to do with them. I am guessing that would fix the 'filter driver' thing as well....

 

Please feel free to reply with any ideas you have, or your own results with promise onboard RAID in any version of Windoze, I would like this post to become a meeting of Promise RAID users; there doesn't seem to be a lot around for us.......

 

cheers

 

Papercup

[Brian Frank 0]

What does this HP stand for: Hewlett Packard? HighPoint?

 

2nd, I don't know about any Promise filter driver. I don't recall any XP driver for the promise controllers. (Promise can suck my...)

 

Oh, and Sandra is a nice benchmarking suite, but not always the most accurate. HDTach, Intel's IOmeter...much better.

 

I know the same thing you're talking about with the RAID thing and Sandra. My 60GXP's score seems awfully low, but I know these are very fast in RAID 0.