My KT7-Raid board is a bit slow...

[Zzzt]

Does anyone have any idea why my board takes so long before it actually starts to load the OS? I seem to have to wait a good 10 seconds for the raid controller to find my 2 drives, and then another 20 or more for "Verifying DMI Pool Data." Is there a setting in BIOS I should have set differently? It takes more than half a minute for my system to start loading the OS. Everything is definately quick from there, but I hate the initial wait.

 

[PwAg]

I had the same issue when testing two Deskstars on ABIT KT7 with RAID 0 format. But I only tested them for a day, so I never had the chance to see if there truly was a problem. Overall the system booted up in 50 sec from power up. That is fine.

 

[Techwhore]

I have one deskstar... the HPT controller doesn't exaclty find it fast but i don't believe it's 10 secs... I do however have a terrible problem in windows. My hard drive performance is VERY weak, i pull in at a mere 6700 on SiSoft's Sandra hard disk benchmark. Any ideas on how to fix this? I tried cacheman, that brought me down to 3200! Booting up is alright i suppose though. Maybe there's a problem with the HPT bios?

 

[ingenue007]

techwhore -

my friend has the kt7 with IBM GXP HD (mine arrives wed. whoo hoo). sandra gives screwed up results of his RAID. use HDTACH to see how your HDs are really performing.

 

[Compellor]

I had this problem on mine, and found out it was the network card. I had to set my DNS settings manually -- it's an issue with having it look for the network automatically.

 

[Techwhore]

ingenue007, I went ahead an ran hdtach:

Random Access Time - 13.1ms
Read Speed Max - 15400 kp/s
Read Speed Min - 12056 kp/s
Read Speed Avg - 14145 kp/s
Read Burst Speed - 56.7 mb/s
CPU Utilization - 3.9%

Ok, I'm under the impression the deskstar is the 4th fastest ide model and normally performs better than this. Shouldn't i get somewhere around 9.5 ms ran. acc. time? The burst is probably about right but I would figure the average read speed would be between 20mb/s and 30mb/s (or 20000kp/s-30000kp/s). Any other suggestions? Tweaks?

 

[PwAg]

Looks as if your transfer rates are capped at 16mb/s. That signifies your drives are configured to and are running at ATA33. Go fix the problem in your BIOS. Your max sustanind transfer rate should be around 39.9mb/s for a RAID 0 setup, or 37mb/s for stand alone drive. Don't confuse access and seek times. Seek for RAID setup should be slightly slower at 9.5ms compared to regular 8.5ms seek of stand alone drive. I doubt you notice any difference, so don't complain about 9.5ms. Access overhead is another 4.2 ms, so totalling time to initiation of transfer should be around 13.7ms for RAID, or 12.7ms for stand alone drive.

Let me just make sure you guys have your RAID 0 setups done correctly. I will just give you a quick run down for setting up the 75GXP's on an Abit KT7RAID for RAID 0:
1. Each drive is on its own ATA-100 IDE channel using ATA66 cable. So drive one on IDE 3, drive two on IDE 4.
2. HTP370 setup utility -> set cluster size to "16k"; set drive interface to "UDMA5"
3. Fdisk and format drives.
4. Done. Very simple.

Good luck.

 

[Techwhore]

i don't have a RAID setup but is UDMA 5 like ATA 100 or something for raid cuz i can only go to UDMA 4. And how do i set the max transfer rate in the HPT bios?

 

[jonnyGURU]

UDMA5 is ATA100.
UDMA4 is ATA66.
UDMA3 we thought was skipped until we saw it as an option on an Abit board. Must be some top secret government UDMA mode.
UDMA2 is ATA33.
UDMA1 is Fast ATA... I think.