bad RAID speed performance

DataChief

Member
Jan 15, 2002
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OK, I just tried the RAID on my Abit KR7A-Raid for the first time and im very disappointed. First off, im not a novice user, and I'm not new to the idea of raid. I've setup everything perfectly, yet I still get crappy transfer speeds.

I have 2 IBM 120GXP 80GB drives (7200RPM, nice fast reliable drives). Each drive is connected to it's own cable and hooked into the separate channels of the controller. Each drive is set to master. They were detected fine, the array was setup fine. I tried it and played around with the transfer speeds in win2k and was disappointed greatly. At first, it would read/write at less than 25MB/sec. This was using 64k stripe size. Basic disk, 3 equal-sized partitions.

I backed my stuff up, flashed the bios to the latest (9N) version for my mobo (this release also includes the latest BIOS for the onboard highpoint raid controller). I even downloaded the latest win2k drivers and installed them. Everything seemed fine. I recreated the array after updating the bios, set the stripe size to 256K, and booted into windows 2000 pro.

It now reads at 30MB/sec and writes at 40MB/sec. Now...considering each drive by itself can read/write at 40MB/sec, why in the hell am I getting such crappy speeds. I've been testing the speeds by transferring a 600MB file to/from the RAID array from multiple drives on this computer.

I have a Seagate Cheetah x15, a WD120JB (8mb cache), and another IBM 120GXP 80gb drive all on this same comp. The transfer times very a little bit from drive to drive, but the array still only does those max speeds listed above.

I've also tried having it a "simple" and "dynamic" disk in windows. I've tried different partition sizes. After one more format and test, I'll up the stripe size to 512 maybe. Then down to 128k and 64k if necessary. I'm planningon using the array mostly for storage of large files (all over 3MB, most over 300MB).


I don't know what to do, this isn't the first time I've had bad luck with a RAID array. I also have an Iwill KK266-r motherboard and have experienced the same type of problem when setting up a RAID0 array.

If anyone can offer some advice, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks ahead of time. There's nothing worse than having terrible performance on something that should be speedy!!!
 

DataChief

Member
Jan 15, 2002
39
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0
oh, i found another great "feature" the raid has...

Whenever i transfer a file to/from the array, while listening to music/etc, it produces the nicest nasty sound interference you could imagine. It's not too loud or anything, just really high-pitched static type crap.

I guess I'll hafta wait til my MSI KT3 Ultra2-R arrives before I can enjoy RAID. I really hope it doesn't have the lack of performance this abit has given me.