IDE RAID 0 Boots slower than SATA RAID 0?!?

[Redline]

I have 2 Seagate Barracuda IDE 80g in a RAID 0 on nearly the EXACT same system(AMD64 3200 w/ASUS K8V SE & 1g RAM) as 2 friends of mine, except they are running RAID 0 on 2 SATA 80g drives(both have different brands). The question is why does theirs boot so much faster than mine?
They both only get 2 full bars during the Windows XP Pro logon screen while I get a full 8 bars.
Does the SATA make that big of difference in boot times?

 

[MrChad]

Do you have the same motherboard? Are you running off of the same RAID controller?

 

[Redline]

EXACT Same MOBO, however they are running off the VT8237 RAID controller for SATA & I am using the Promise 20378 RAID controller for IDE. Here's the MOBO: LINK
P.S. Thanks for the quick response :Q .

 

[MrChad]

Can you disable the VT8237 controller in the BIOS? Does that improve your boot times at all?

 

[Smilin]

Not sure if it's a promise thing or a pata thing but my Promise PATA RAID0 controller takes AGES to finish posting. My SATA Silicon Images Raid0 takes like 2 seconds to detect the drives and move on.

It's nothing to do with XP - this is all during post.

 

[Redline]

Originally posted by: MrChad
Can you disable the VT8237 controller in the BIOS? Does that improve your boot times at all?

I'll look tonight-thanks.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Redline
I have 2 Seagate Barracuda IDE 80g in a RAID 0 on nearly the EXACT same system(AMD64 3200 w/ASUS K8V SE & 1g RAM) as 2 friends of mine, except they are running RAID 0 on 2 SATA 80g drives(both have different brands). The question is why does theirs boot so much faster than mine?
They both only get 2 full bars during the Windows XP Pro logon screen while I get a full 8 bars.
Does the SATA make that big of difference in boot times?

D'oh. Just read your post a bit closer.

Do this: Boot up, and delete the contents of your Windows\Prefetch folder (or just move everything to a backup folder if it makes you nervous).

Your next boot will be lightning fast although the computer may not be as responsive the first few seconds after boot. On subsequent reboots it will take a bit longer but should settle into a speed that is still much faster than before.

If you've had your OS up and running for a while it's possible Windows is trying to cache up some stuff you might not use any longer.

I bet you'll boot faster than your friends now

 

[Redline]

Well that worked...sort of. First boot after deleting folder contents was quick but after another reboot it went from 2 passes to 6-not good. More stuff showed up in the folder.
Couldn't I just create a batch file that deleted the contents of the folder everytime I shutdown?

 

[Unforgiven]

in theory that should work (the batch file that is). im not sure of the importance of that folder so im not gonna endorse it, but it should definately work in batch format.

 

[Unforgiven]

i found a prefetch manager on majorgeeks that may be useful for this:

LINKAGE

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Redline
Well that worked...sort of. First boot after deleting folder contents was quick but after another reboot it went from 2 passes to 6-not good. More stuff showed up in the folder.<BR>Couldn't I just create a batch file that deleted the contents of the folder everytime I shutdown?

You don't want to do that.

Prefetch should only be cleared out maybe once every six months or so. The stuff that has reappeared is stuff you're accessing shortly after boot. Leave it there. The purpose of clearing it out was to get rid of stuff you may have been using a long time ago but no longer do. That 6 'passes' you are now getting is what you should expect when you boot.

Run a defrag, but other than that you're probably booting as fast as you can. MSConfig may reveal some startup items that you can remove.