Raid striping performance

[motofox-UK 0]

Hi, just installed 2 40gb baracuda 7200 rpm on my Highpoint raid conntroller of the asus A7M266-e and dont think the performance is nowhere near what it should be.

HDTACH shows about 30mb/sec trancsfer and 12m seek.

Sisoft sandra 2002 shows my harddrives below 2 striped ata 66 drives.

Could this be due to the raid controller and USB ports sharing the same IRQs, which im finding imposible to change ???????

Thanks in advance.

[Brian Frank 0]

#1. Asus uses Promise RAID controllers. You have Asus or an Abit or Iwill board if you have the HPT controllers.

On that note, I recall reading about the HPT370 controller and the baracuda drives running extremely poorly in RAID 0.

I'm not sure if this happens with Promise controllers or not, as I haven't read about any issues.

The IRQ sharing isn't a problem. You're not able to change this due to the way ACPI sets up devices. You have a bunch of devices on 1 IRQ, but your system thinks the devices all have their own IRQ.

 

Do you notice it's slow without the benchmarks? Sandra doesn't give me all that great of scores and my RAID 0 array is really quick (although I use IBM 60GXP's).

[pikapan 0]

If you go and look at viaarena's downloads page, they offer a raid patch that's supposed to help boost raid speeds on via chipsets. I believe the latest 4-in-1 pack that was just released has it bundled as well. I do know that what you're experiencing is a common problem and there're a ton of posts about it on both viahardware and viaarena. You can try looking there if the patch doesn't help.

[motofox-UK 0]

Thanks for reply,

Yeah i have noticed an increase in loading times of large files and games,which i was expecting but it was just these benchmarking software that had me wondering.

I have had IBM deskstars 7200 for last 4 years but are terribly unreliable due to faults in newer drives, and the last 3 ibms iv had back this up LOL.

Quite impressed though with the performance of the baracudas.