Adaptec 29160 - problems with slow write times

[Horio]

I just purchased an Adaptec 29160 card and put it into my computer last week. I have it running with a single Seagate Barracuda 18gig U160 drive. The duo seems to work just fine. On startup it detects the card and the hardrive properly. I noticed that the hard drive was writing slower than my regular old IDE drives. So I benchmarked it with sandra to see how fast it was running. The read times are just fine, and plenty fast but the write times did come out very slow. The hard drive is only writing at about 3 megs a second. I have a second Barracuda drive just like it, and hooked it up to see if the first hard drive was just bad. The benchmarks came out to be the same. As of right now I am stumped. I'm thinking something isnt configured quite right, but Im stumped. I appreciate any ideas you may have. Thanks

Horio

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OS - WinXP
AMD - 1800XP
Asus NForce
Adaptec 29160
2 x Seagate Barrcuda U160 18gig

 

[Lorne]

Got me curious too, Are you using the LVD channel or the LVD/SE channel, Any other scsi drives used also like cd/cdr/zip?
is everything set correctly in the controller bios. (ctrl-a as it fetches drives during boot, Just incase you didnt know).

Also check Adaptec's website for correct drivers, I think there was a problem there are XP spacific drivers needed, I didnt pay the closest attention to this since I run 98se at this time.

Whats funny is my writespeed it great and my reads are alot slower, Never did like Sandra's benches for drives.

 

[mastertech01]

Do you have read and write caching enabled?

Read times will always be faster than write anyway though.

ALso SISOFT isnt the best benchmark for SCSI. If you have Easy SCSI use the benchmark in it, or download ATTO Bench

 

[Horio]

As of right now, I only have one of the barracuda hard drives connected to the card. Its connected to the port closest to the rear end of the case. Another strange thing that happening to me, is I am unable to get into the SCSIselect menu during bootup. I try to use cntrl-A but it doesnt work, and there is never a line saying "press cntrl-A for settings." Is there a way to maybe reset the bios or something so I can access those options.

Horio