Terrible RAID 1 performance, please help!

[karstenanderson]

Ok so i'm running 2x120gb seagate 7200.7 IDE drives in RAID 1 on my DFI lanparty nf3 ut 250gb. read/write speeds are about 15MB/s where each single drive gets about 60MB/s. what's going on?

 

[John]

Did you set up raid1 (mirror) on purpose, or did you think that it was really a stripe (raid0)?

What program are you using to benchmark?

 

[karstenanderson]

lol yeah i set up RAID 1 on purpose for archival purposes. i'm using hd tach for the speeds. individually the drives get almost 60MB/s but combined in raid the speed is like 15 MB/s. also, i did a visual inspection by copying large files from other physical disks and sure enough the speed is way slower. they do have different firmwares 3.06 and 3.54, should that matter that much?

 

[OdiN]

The firmware could matter.

Do they have a RAID specific drive like WD does? They used to on their Barracuda ATA IV's - when I wrote a RAID guide once with those drives Seagate had to send me replacements with different firmware to get the RAID performance where it should be.

 

[karstenanderson]

i'm not sure if seagate has a raid drive or not. i'll be calling tech support monday to see what they have to say, its looking more and more like a firmware issue. i'd get another to replace one but i'm not even sure if having two with the same firmware would fix it if theyre just not made for RAID setups in the first place. hm. thanks much

karsten