Originally posted by: Smilin
Edit: This is about half educated guess and about half WASP (wild-assed speculation). I'm no tard, but without really digging into this from in front of the computer I can't give a solid answer.
Possibilities:
Undetected filesystem errors
Detected filesystem errors (see your system log look for event 7,9,11, 51, 55)
Wrong or out of date drivers
Wrong or out of date BIOS/Firmware
Really stupid stripe setting (64K stripe unless you have a good reason otherwise).
Disk overlay software or other 3rd party app that's shifted your cluster boundaries so they no longer match your track and/or stripe boundaries.
Some non-problem related explanations:
Anandtech was using a clean test system. I'm betting you have a startup item or two running eh?
Anandtech did a reboot and defrag between each test run - not a realistic expectation for your system.
Non-disk related bottleneck in your system. Fire up perfmon and have a look at the typical: processor, memory, disk.
The thing to be super worried about is you're having read/write failures coupled with delayed read/write success. The net result is everything appears slow because it's crapping out and having to retry over and over. Any SMART errors?
First off, thanks for the reply!
I've had a look through the event viewer and the only errors you mentioned were Error: 51 for the CD rom, so no HD problems on that front.
As for drivers, I'm currently using the most up to date drivers from the nVidia website for the NF7-s v2 motherboard. Same also for the SATA controller as well I believe (Silicon Image 3112A onboard controller)
As for the bios, I did update the motherboards BIOS a time a go with a somewhat custom one, though I don't think it replaced the SATA bios. Before that I upgraded with the latest BIOS from the Abit site - with a BIOS where the SATA corruption was fixed.
For more details on my setup, it was a fresh install on the RAID array, and I think I'm using 16k stripes, though from benchmarks I've seen, stripe size doesn't make much difference?
I'm also running an XP3200+ and DDR400 ram (I know i'm running at stock, but when I'm paying for the electricity, I think I'll be alright without the extra few hundred MHz!)
I know the Silicon Image controller uses the PCI bus, but that still means a max transfer rate of some 133mb/s.
I've used other benchmarks, namely "road kill's HD bench" which in read tests my RAID array can score over 100mb/s so transfer rates are not all round low, but only in copy for some reason???
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