Slow SATA drive

[Bglad]

OK, if I sound panicked, here is why. I have months of video editing work on my RAID drive and I got a virus, one of those where I have 100 outgoing e-mails as soon as I boot up rendering the machine unuseable.

My setup is an Asus K8N-E Deluxe mobo with Athlon 64 and 1GB RAM. Hoping someone is familiar with this board. I have a middle grade 3d vid card and a medium grade analog/digital video/audio capture card installed. That is all that is installed and none of these have given me any problems or signs of conflicts.

I run a DVD and CD burner on primary IDE. I have a standard IDE backup hard drive (that is not big enough, hence my not being backed up) in a removeable drive drawer plugged into the secondary IDE master. My C: drive is 2 RAIDed 160G SATA drives on the first 2 of the 4 Silicon Valley connectors.

To back up the RAID drive before reloading for this virus, I bought a new 300GB SATA drive and connected it to the #1 standard SATA plug (there are 2 standard SATA plugs and 4 Silicon Valley SATA plugs on this board).

Now here is the problem... I use Drive Image to backup. When using the old regular IDE drive I was getting 1400-1600m/min transfer rates which allowed me to backup the system in approx 3 hours. With the new SATA drive I'm getting 400-500m/min transfer rates and backup is taking 12-14 hours!

What the heck is goin on here? I gotta get this thing backed up but I'm about to take the SATA drive back and get a regular. Do I have something set wrong?

Thanks for the help.

 

[montag451]

What RAID are you using? RAID0 or RAID1?
RAID0 means if something screws up, you may lose everything.
RAID1 means if something screws up, you are less likely to lose everything.

Are you using high compression to do the backup - if yes, that is why it is taking so long.
Does the drive feel like it is going at normal speed apart from the backup process?

 

[Bglad]

I'm using RAID 0 but the data is recoverable so that is not an issue.

I'm using the same compression to compare the two drives and the SATA is 4-5 times slower.

I don't know how it feels apart from the backup process. It is brand new and I've never run it in Windows. I am comparing the two drives booting with a DOS disk and directly into Drive Image.

 

[Bglad]

By the way, tried the new SATA drive on #2 plug as well and get exactly the same results.

All settings in BIOS are set to auto and it seems to recognize the drive and its attributes properly.

 

[montag451]

After the backup, if you use the drives - then let us know if they seem slow.

 

[Bglad]

Well I'm not even dealing with Windows and drivers yet. If it is this slow, I'm not going to keep it. But that brings up another problem which is it is getting difficult to find regular IDE drives this big.

I would sure like to solve this problem!

 

[montag451]

Wait until we can see if there is a problem.
It might just be that your utility has to work harder at reading from RAID or writing to SATA for some silly reason.
Wait and see.
Then panic if you need to, not before.

 

[Bglad]

No, I need to panic now.

As I write this, I'm finalizing a contract for more video work and I have to get this computer back up and working.

The new SATA drive is for backup only. It will NEVER be installed in the computer when Windows is booted. Besides Windows just introduces drivers and more interfaces i.e. layers of things that could be going wrong. Right now it is running in it's simplest configuration and would be a better time to identify the problem.

 

[montag451]

run a mobo diagnostic that boots into its own os.
Something like microscope if you have a mate with a copy of it.
Otherwise, you will have to experiment with some of the settings in bios, different cable, etc.
Just to check, is RAID enabled or disabled in the BIOS for the new drive?
Also, might be best to check it on all spare channels.
Might find that some of the channels are 'paired' to increase RAID i/o.

 

[Bglad]

Bump.

Still really stuck on this. Picked up a 300G ATA drive on the way home and am backing up right now at a data rate of about 1500MB/min.

Problem is I need more drives than I have standard IDE plugs. I need to be able to use the SATA headers so still looking for some help.

Thanks.

 

[Bglad]

FYI, not that anyone still cares about my problems but...

Turns out this was a bug in the motherboard. A bios update solved the problem!