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RAID0 Performance

R

Rebus3

Junior Member
I'm running an all-new KT7A-RAID, TBird 1GHz/133DDR FSB, 256MB PC133 SDRAM, two WD 20GB 7200rpm UDMA100 HD's in RAID0 (striped), Win2kproSP1.
RAID performance, according to WinBench99, is disappointing. It's a tabletop flat 22MB/s from start to finish. I can get that from a single drive. (Typically it's a curve from inside to outside of platter, but perhaps RAID is doing funny things.) I updated the VIA4in1 drivers from 4.26 to 4.28beta -- no change. It's like it's capped. The HPT Bios says it's in UDMA5 mode (ATA100). The WD utility says the drives are set to ATA100 mode. WIN2k says DMA mode is on. I formatted with a 32kB sector size via the HPT BIOS. I read later in an online article that 16kB is most efficient for this RAID controller, but I wouldn't expect a halving of performance from this alone. Has anybody compared performance with different sector sizes? It wanted to default to 64kB, BTW.
The only other seemingly retarded thing is that Win2k assigned IRQ11 to nearly everything: nVidia card, Ethernet card, Soundblaster 5.1 card, USB ports, RAID controller; even though there are several free IRQ's available. Win2k does not allow modification of it's IRQ assignments, and it ignores manual BIOS assignments.
🙁
 
Yeah, I have heard from many people that RAID is bad on regular IDE drives, and the fact that it doesn't work very well nor speed up performance very much. Most of the people I've contacted said that they experience minimal performance in their setups, so I'm assuming it's no different for you. I've also read, but am not very sure about the article's accuracy, but when I was on Sharky Extreme's website, I was browsing their articles, only to find a review that stated that RAID 0 on IDE devices has been known to corrupt data??? Not sure about that one, but I would think it would be just fine, otherwise people would avoid IDE RAID and they wouldn't have manufactured any cards. That's about all I can tell you right now. Best of luck to ya!
 
Try using the stock win2k BUs mastering drivers. I went from a 39990 Sandra bench to a 17000 when I install the Via (4.25 - 4.28) 4 in 1 drivers. I tried uninstalling the VIA bus mastering driver and it made no difference. I had to reinstall win2k.
 
The 2K SP2 should be out somewhat soon and it's rumored to improve HD performance. It'll add support for ATA100 for sure, but I doubt if that alone will help performance. I'm sure they've done/restructured something else that helps the performance. Just something I've heard from people so maybe it's nothing...we'll see
 
😕 But I've read in online reviews of this MB and the earlier KT7-RAID that HD performance increased by about 80% going from single drive to RAID 0. None of the reviews had any negative experience. Meanwhile, I'm seeing no increase. What's the point in selling a feature that has no value? This isn't Microsoft😉 it's ABit, but the problem may be with Win2k.
 
😕How do you install the stock Win2k busmastering drivers instead of the VIA 4 in 1 drivers? As I recall, after going through the regular win2k install process, I was running the 4.26 drivers out of the box. I didn't have to install them from CD.
 
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