HELP!!! 4 drive ATA100 raid on Iwill kk266-r is getting lower scores than 2 drive ata100!!!!

[Acanthus]

sisoft sandra is reading my quad ata100 raid0 array (4x15GB seagate 7200rpm) as about the same speed as a single ATA100 drive. My stripe size is 512k, and ive done all of the hard drive tweaks (network server role etc..) my virtual memory is static at min300 max300. The raid device says raid 5 on all of the drives during post. Yet i cant find anything in windows that confirms that its ultra DMA at all. In the device manager on the controllers or the drive settings there is no place to enable/disable ultra DMA, the only thing i can change is the sync data transfer, and i have no clue what that does. It doesnt seem to effect anything if i enable or disable it i have tried it both ways. If you know anything i can do PLEASE HELP! thanx in advance -Derek-

 

[Acanthus]

correction stripe size is 256k

 

[Bozo Galora]

On motherboard raid sucks - it is "lite raid", involving both software and hardware, tho they dont tell you that. RAID 5 involves very complex calculations, placing heavy toll on system. If you REALLY want RAID, you have to buy (at the very least) a Promise Fasttrak TX-4 full 4 channel RAID card which does full hardware independent channel RAID 5, and configure all four drives as master primary, ea alone in its own Promise socket connector.

 

[Amused]

<< correction stripe size is 256k >>



Your stripe size is too big.

There are two schools of thought on this. Some swear my 64, others by 126. But 256 is WAY too big.

My stripe size is 64, and all my benchmarks are on par with other 2 drive and 4 drive (I have both) RAID-0 set-ups

 

[Bozo Galora]

RAID 5

(Edit: to explain the drive image given - they are writing "arstechnica sushi" to the drives in sequence allowed by RAID version)

 

[crt1530]

<< On motherboard raid sucks >>


Yep.

 

[Acanthus]

im almost positive its the crap raid controller on this Iwill, if its as great as their "5.1 surround integrated" which my blaster live platinum kills in quality, and their great support for video cards, considering i can use anything in the geforce or radeon series because of the crap low volt AGP port, i just wanna volt mod the hell out of this thing and get a promise independant channel raid card. BTW the drive are daisy chained, i was expecting that to paralyze the performance, but not all the way down to ata100 transfer rates