SLOW A** Raid in XP?

[FuzzyB]

Okay... I finally got Windoze XP installed on my two WD 30 gigs in Raid 0.... But according to Sisoft Sandra, the performance SUCKS A**! Slower than a single ATA100 7200! Yes, the pair is the exact same drive, 100/7200rpm.. So WTF? is there a setting I'm missing in the KT7A Raid bios or in XP's vast menus somewhere?


Why does the Raid 0 SUCK so bad in XP?

 

[cleverhandle]

Well, do you actually notice the disks feeling slow, or is Sandra's report your only clue? Sandra is a pretty crappy measure of real performance. But if you really want that meaningless 44000 drive index, there are probably things you can do. Check in your RAID utility to make sure the drives are being detected at ATA100, turn off system restore, and, especially, defrag. I've had scores go up almost 30000 points after a defrag, even though the system didn't feel any different.

 

[FuzzyB]

The drives were Fdisked then formated as Raid0... all they've got on it is XP. Could you reccomend a good program to get a real idea of the performance based on other drives?

 

[MasterHoss]

HD Tach but you'll have to pay for it.

 

[cleverhandle]

There's really no meaningful storage benchmark that you can run yourself. HDTach is okay for single IDE drives, but doesn't mean much past that. Atto is sorta okay, as is Winstone Content Creation or Winbench, but for all of those it's difficult to find references to compare your results against. You can find a variety of benchmarks here and, if you're in for a good read, can get an idea of the complexity of the problem by checking out Storage Reviews description of their most recent testbed here.

 

[tboo]

There is a new patch out from via that is supposed to greatly improve RAID performance(they mention RAID cards, though, not integrated chipsets) -Read about it & get it here

 

[FuzzyB]

Sandra gave me a score of 17 thousand something... and it says SINGLE drives like mine get around 24 thousand. Last I checked even my fairly poor math skills showed that 24K was more than 17K. What gives? They're on seperate ports on the Raid controller, both set as Master/single because they're the only drives on their respective ports. Formatted and installed XP on it and even got the install to use the 2.3 drivers. The only thing I can't do is update the bios, I hit the loader thingy and tell it what bios to use and it locks. Floppy light stays on and nothing really happens. anyone have some idea of the problem? it's 1.11.4 bios or something on the controller right now...

 

[Shide1]

My raid performance was piss poor. Sandra said around 10,000. I then installed the patch and defragged. My score is now a very nice 41,416. I have 2 60Gb IBM 60GXP on a MSI K7T266PRO2-RU.

 

[FuzzyB]

Right now I'm down to trying to configure the IRQ's in Bios manually so the Controller chip isn't sharing an IRQ with the freakin' network card, vid. card, and sound card for some reason... having little success I installed the patch, Defragged, and fiddled in Bios... got 21K, but still shy of the 24K for a SINGLE drive..