rediculously bad drive speeds with onboard raid

[dudzcom]

ok, so i got a new machine. yay.

bummer is that the machine's 2 sata western digital re 400gb hds (wd4000yr) are raided together in RAID1, and are performing worth crap... together, they are performing at about half the speed as one should standing alone.

motherboard: asus a8n-sli premium, with an on-board silicon image 3114r raid controller (sata)
setup: both drives are plugged into the 3114r controller.

so far:
updated drivers like mad, however it seems ive got the newest drivers for everything.
flashed bios with the newest version (no help).


suggestions! please! i will give you $5 if u help me solve this... big money if ur from somalia

thanks in advance
-will

 

[Zepper]

One should really know his RAID functions before setting up his drives... RAID-1 is NOT for high performance, it is for redundancy for maximum uptime - RAID-1 usually works a bit slower than a single drive alone. If you wanted high performance, you shoud have gotten two 160 or 250GB drives and put them in RAID-0 and use one of your 400GB as a drive for making the requisite backups... RAID-0 arrays have a bit more opportunity for failure than a stand-alone drive of equal size. RAID-0 is the max performance mode of most integrated (software) RAID controllers.

RAID 0+1, usually takes four equal-sized drives (talking PATA RAID here, not sure what is required on SATA where all connectors are on separate channels): two would be in RAID-0, and the other two would be RAID-1 mirrors of the first two. That should yield a bit better performance than a single drive alone.

Oh, and FYI: RAID-1 is NOT considered adequate backup. A separate, file-by-file backup on rotated media and stored off-site is condidered adequate backup. Drive images are also not considered adequate backup either - one error in the image file can lose all the data in the image file or at least all the data past the error in the image file. Whereas one error in a file-by-file backup will result in the corruption of only ONE of the backed up files.

.bh.

 

[Madwand1]

RAID 1 often has an initial "building" step which takes a long time and chews up some performance -- see if you can see something about this in the setup software notes / status / etc.

If not, just give it a day or so, and then check the performance again.