SLOW RAID 0 performance on KR7A

[Moshster]

Hello all,

I am trying to fgure out why my KR7A RAID 0 config is significantly slower then my old SA6R RAID 0 setup. I did a sandra test and my score's are coming out around 28000 which is slower then 2 ATA66 drives in RAID 0. I am using the same hard drives from my old system, I didn't even unscrew them from the case. Same cable's and everything.
I used the newest BIOS from pauls FAQ page and the latest one with his hacked in highpoint beat bios. I also used the latest drivers from highpoint and the betas to match the beta BIOS.
I am using 2 x 30gig IBM 75GXp's, one of them had a bad sector about 1 month ago. I ran IBM's utils to write 0's to the drive and then ran the fitness test for 24hrs straight and all was well. I have 3 paritions setup and 32K custer size, all paritions are using NTFS.
OS is win XP
are my drives getting tired? has anyone else tested this MB for HD performance?

TIA
MosHster

 

[Allen7]

I have the same question here too, except I am using 2X 45GB IBM 75GXP's on Asus A7V133-Raid.

I had the mobo for awhile without using the raid function before, just using the Promise chip as ATA100 controller. Bought couple 45G HDD on the forum cheap so I decided to try the raid feature.

Things went well mostly (except the driver issue), when I finished the installation I couldn't notice any gains comparing with my single WD 40GB HDD, so I ran Sandra2001Te Pro to verify. My result was similar to Moshster's, just slightly slower than 2xATA66 HDD's.

Can anyone please help?

And how do you check if the DMA is enabled in WinXP?

Allen

 

[LostHiWay]

I was reading about this on amdforums.com. It seems that the kt266a chipset cannot handle RAID 0 very well esp. for the ata133 drives which is why most people got the KR7A. VIA need to release a fix for this.

 

[MikeR]

The guy over at www.viahardware.com who writes their FAQ's has got a KR7A faq that suggest using 'cable select' on the raid drives. He suggests that this will speed up Raid-0

 

[metalhawk]

Huh...

I added a 3rd drive to my KR7A raid array, switched to cable select as suggested, and my performance DROPPED from 28000 to 21500 in Sandra.

Grrr. I will check out the other suggested forum...

 

[DIRTsquirt]

"Some users have found that overall system performance can be severely hit if a Soundblaster sound card is allowed to share an IRQ with a Network Interface Card (NIC). Symptons include reduced disk performance, high CPU activity on disk access and jumpy mouse movement." Dood www.viahardware.com has a great resource that I pulled this little ditty from? try changing slots on Lan card or
just removing it and running the test again.... hope this helps if not perhaps lookin at viahardware will turn up some insite for you

 

[LostHiWay]

<< Huh...

I added a 3rd drive to my KR7A raid array, switched to cable select as suggested, and my performance DROPPED from 28000 to 21500 in Sandra.

Grrr. I will check out the other suggested forum... >>



A score of 28000 in Sandra is horrible for a RAID 0 Arrary. You should be getting at least in the very high 30's maybe even low 40's. Something is really wrong with the KT266a and Raid 0

 

[acidpad]

i have 2 ibm 60 gxps raided, and split into two partitions, a 20 gig os and program partitions, and a 100 gig storage partition. my 20 gig partition gets scores in the 38000s, that 20 gigs is the first 20 gigs of the HDD. my 100 gig partition is nearly full however, and thus when being benchmarked the file is written toward the end of the hdds, and usually gets scores typical of a single 30 gb 7200 drive. when it was empty i got scores in the 40000 with the kt7a ... its the same array, i just switched it into my kr7a board. try upgrading to the newest version of sandra, you never know, it may just be a quirk with the ver of sandra your running.

 

[acidpad]

Just hit me, try taking whatever card you have in slot 5 out and moving it, slot 5 shares the irq with the hpt372 controller, and some devices are just greedy and dont like sharing.