Poor performance with GigaRaid GA-N400 Pro2

[gofor55]

Poor performance with GigaRaid GA-7N400 Pro2, 2000+, FSB=143Mhz

I've just installed two WD 160 GB, 7200 RPM, 8 MB cache drives as master on their one IDE channels of the onboard GigaRaid. When I test the Raid 0 array with Sisoft Sandra, it reports that I am getting ~30,000 kB/s and that my write performance is low. I've tried the latest drivers and am using 64k blocks.

Pinnacle 8 reports that my write speed is ~20,000 kB/s on the Raid 0 array and the write performance on my Seagate 80 GB boot drive is 30,000 kB/s.

Why can I not get above a single drives performance with a stripped array? :beer::brokenheart::beer:

 

[wetcat007]

Do you got all the drivers installed?

 

[ThatDumbGuy]

I had the same motherboard and same problem. My non-array drives were quicker than my RAID0. I actually noticed my system slow down once I created the array, so I benched it, and sure as crap, it was true. Just one of the problems with the board that made me happy with it when I had a DIMM slot fry and had to RMA it.

 

[gofor55]

Yep, I think so. I started with the driver on the mobo CD. I installed the windows RAID utility too. Then I downloaded the latest from Gigabyte, and installed that. It seemed to take me down in performance, so I reinstalled the CD again.

\ite_raid
--GigaRAID(IT8212F) Driver
--GigaRAID Utility

The "SCSI" raid appears in Device Manager and I can address the volume, it's just really slow.

 

[gofor55]

So did replacing the mobo fix the slow raid problem?? Did you use the same one?

 

[ThatDumbGuy]

Sorry to tell you but you are just screwed. Nowhere I've read shows a way to fix this, and alot of people have had the same problem. Nforcershq.com forums specifically had alot of people talking about it. I would RMA it if you could, and hope for a BIOS update if ya couldnt.


EDIT: To answer your question, I ended up going with a different motherboard.

 

[gofor55]

Uh.... oh... I think I just found the problem and you're right.

http://www.amdforums.com/showthread.php?s=299d6a2f8e47b80d06bac8508e114b69&threadid=266766

Apparently Gigaraid = Promise and it's really bad!

Crap... and I was really happy with this board... till now.... :brokenheart:

 

[ThatDumbGuy]

Yeah, sorry to be the one to break it to ya. Hopefully you can still RMA the thing, but the problem is that there arent really any IDE RAID boards at that price range for the Ultra 400 chipset. I ended up selling my 2 40gb's and going with a Raptor personally. Good luck to ya.

 

[gofor55]

Thanks for all the help.... I got suckered by the good reviews.

This was my first time using Anandtech Forums, tho I've been reading for years. I am very pleased with the process of finding out this bad news. I'm afraid, I've had the board from Newegg too long to return it (ordered 9/22/2003). I've been waiting for extra $$ to finish my new system intended for video editing.