To those who own Iwill KK266R (with AMI RAID) or KK266Plus-R (with either
AMI or Highpoint RAID) mobo, beware of the onboard RAID controller peformance.
I own an Iwill KK266R running Win2K with 1.2G Athlon, 512 PC133 and 2 Maxtor
ATA100 7200 HDs stripped in 64K RAID 0 configuration. Recently, I run the Sandra
2002 File System Benchmark. To my surprise, the result was even worse than the
reference Sandra single ATA66 7200 HD. To isolate the problem, I did the following
4 testing:
(1) Update the mobo with the most recent Iwill posted RAID driver
(2) Disable the onboard AMI RAID and connect the HDs with regular master/slave IDE
ATA100 channels.
(3) Disable the onboard AMI RAID and install an Highpoint-based Iwill SIDE RAID
PCI card.
(4) Run the same Highpoint-based Iwill SIDE RAID card on a Tyan mobo system.
What I have found out is that (1) to (3) did not make much difference in terms of
disk performance. However, (4) does produce performance result close to the
Sandra reference ATA100 7200 RAID 0 benchmark.
Based on the above finding, I suspect that Iwill's mobo must have some serious defect
in its design on handling IDE disks. After speaking with Iwill tech support, they
indicated that the latest KK266PLus-R did replace AMI with Highpoint RAID controller.
Their sent me a replacement KK266PLus-R mobo. Based on (3) and (4), I am not sure if
Highpoint solve the disk performance problem.
I welcome for those who own an Iwill KK266Plus-R with Highpoint RAID controller, you
may want to run the Sandra 2002 File System becnhmark and verify its performance
number.
- Dhsieh4
AMI or Highpoint RAID) mobo, beware of the onboard RAID controller peformance.
I own an Iwill KK266R running Win2K with 1.2G Athlon, 512 PC133 and 2 Maxtor
ATA100 7200 HDs stripped in 64K RAID 0 configuration. Recently, I run the Sandra
2002 File System Benchmark. To my surprise, the result was even worse than the
reference Sandra single ATA66 7200 HD. To isolate the problem, I did the following
4 testing:
(1) Update the mobo with the most recent Iwill posted RAID driver
(2) Disable the onboard AMI RAID and connect the HDs with regular master/slave IDE
ATA100 channels.
(3) Disable the onboard AMI RAID and install an Highpoint-based Iwill SIDE RAID
PCI card.
(4) Run the same Highpoint-based Iwill SIDE RAID card on a Tyan mobo system.
What I have found out is that (1) to (3) did not make much difference in terms of
disk performance. However, (4) does produce performance result close to the
Sandra reference ATA100 7200 RAID 0 benchmark.
Based on the above finding, I suspect that Iwill's mobo must have some serious defect
in its design on handling IDE disks. After speaking with Iwill tech support, they
indicated that the latest KK266PLus-R did replace AMI with Highpoint RAID controller.
Their sent me a replacement KK266PLus-R mobo. Based on (3) and (4), I am not sure if
Highpoint solve the disk performance problem.
I welcome for those who own an Iwill KK266Plus-R with Highpoint RAID controller, you
may want to run the Sandra 2002 File System becnhmark and verify its performance
number.
- Dhsieh4
