RAID 0 help/problem

imported_pyr0x

Junior Member
Jan 22, 2007
9
0
0
Hi

I'm putting together a much needed new pc for myself and I'm experiencing a weird issue. Here are is my hardware first:

case:Antec P182
mobo: GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3P
GPU: EVGA 512-P3-N862-AR GeForce 9600GT
PSU: SeaSonic S12 Energy Plus SS-550HT
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Conroe
RAM: G.SKILL 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ
2 HDD's: Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
optical drive: SAMSUNG 20X DVD±R DVD Burner Black SATA Model SH-S203B
heatsink: thermalright ultra-120 extreme
heatsink fan: Scythe S-FLEX SFF21E 120mm
gpu heatsink: ARCTIC COOLING Accelero S2 VGA Cooler


NOTE: I am not overclocking. I'm currently running everything stock to get it up and running first. My system is also not overheating as I checked all the temps and they are very cool.

Alrighty then. So my mobo comes with 2 sata controllers, intel and gigabyte. I disabled the gigabyte and decided to go with the intel controller.

So I setup my 2 brand new WD drives as a RAID 0 in the controller utility during post. That all went fine.

I boot off my geniune windows XP pro sp2 cd, do the f6 stuff with the floppy drive, load the driver fine, create a 100GB partition and do a non-quick format. That all went great and smooth. During the windows component install the expected warning similar to this one popped up twice: http://www.duxcw.com/digest/Ho...abit/kx7-333/warn1.jpg . I clicked yes on both.

Windows finished installing very very quick.

Now once I got into windows I noticed that my system was pretty much "freezing up" every 10-15 seconds for about a 0.5 seconds at a time. It was very random but consistent. Any animation on the monitor, including cursor movement, would lag for a second and then come back. I knew that this couldn't be good.

I proceeded to install all of my hardware's updated drivers. I don't have any of my external components connected or installed yet. driver installs all went great, rebooted multiple times with no issues; but the lagging every few seconds was still there.

I decided to create 2 more partitions on my RAID 0. I create the partitions and begin full formatting with windows XP pro sp2 32bit disk manager. They begin to format fine and I went to bed.

This morning my PC was rebooted and sitting idle in windows. I checked the event log and noticed this entry posted about 10-15 times after I went to bed (most likely while the 2 partitions were still formatting).

"An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation"

My PC was also still lagging.

After doing some research it looks like this could be a number of things. I can't seem to find anyone who has had this problem of their system lagging every few seconds while in windows. I also can't find anyone who has had this problem specifically with a RAID.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

When I get home I will be re-seating all my connections on the hard drives/motherboard and trying different SATA cables/ports on the Intel controller. If this doesn't work I will be deleting the RAID array and attempt to install XP on 1 individual drive to see if one of the drives is bad.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated. Thank you!
 

Captante

Lifer
Oct 20, 2003
30,357
10,883
136
My first guess would be a problem with the RAID driver ... did you use the most recent Intel RAID driver when you installed Windows? You also mentioned a Gigabyte RAID controller ... do you know what chipset its based on?

Also RAID 0's performance gain is virtually none-existant using new HD's, but it does make for a much more fragile Windows install ... if you have your heart set on a RAID array you would be better off using RAID 1 which will at least give you the benefit of redundency.