WD Caviar Black 1.5TB RAID 1 slowdown

[Questor]

I recently bought two WD Caviar Black hard drives to use in a RAID 1 Mirroring array. The array builds in the RAID BIOS or with the Intel Rapid Storage software in the Windows environment. The "drive" - array is also recognized in Admin Tools - Computer Management - Storage - Disk Management and formats NTFS no problem. Setting up using GUID partitioning either one large partition, 2 or 3 partitions works fine and the IRS (now there's an acronym good for a chuckle) software initializes the array no problem.
After all this is said and done, the system is all primed and ready to go, things start to slow down. First it is a tiny hitch, then it becomes words being typed, but show up 15 seconds later, then it's web pages hanging, email downloading from the server and/or opening taking a few birthdays, then it becomes MS Word taking a few forevers to open or operate and finally we finish with an eventual and complete system freeze.

There are no errors displayed. Diagnostics have been run on the drives as well as surface scans. Nada! It may be important to note in all this, that not a single digit of information has been written to these drives yet by me. Just the array building process, formatting and initialization. Somehow this new array causes the entire system to slow down until it freezes up.

I have tried two BIOS flashes, downloading and installing the latest storage/raid drivers and swapping out cables, one at a time with no luck in finding the cause. Deleting the array and letting the drives "sit." (as it were), returns system performance back to light speed every time.

Asus doesn't seem to know why. Western Digitial doesn't seem to know why. I surely don't know why. Does anyone have any idea why?

Windows 7 - 64bit
Samsung 470 128GB SSD
WD Velociraptor 150GB x2 RAID 0
WD Caviar Black 1.5TB...uh RAID...nothing
ASUS P8P67 PRO (board rev 1.01) Sandybridge fix rev 3 (board came straight from ASUS)
16 GB G.Skill DDR3
Core i5 Quad 2500K
Noctua NH-D14 (140 MM fans)
Samsung DVDRW
Lian Li PC-A70F Tower
PCP&C 750 Watt PS
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 w/ARCTIC COOLING Accelero TWIN TURBO
Windows and all drivers up to date.

 

[aigomorla]

did u enable TLER?

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=31802102&postcount=15

"When do i need TLER?
You need TLER-capable disks when using any Hardware RAID or any Windows-based software RAID; bummer if you're on Windows platform! But this also means Hardware RAID on any OS (FreeBSD/Linux) would also need TLER disks; even when configured to run as 'JBOD' array. There may be controllers with different firmware that allow you to set the timeout limit for I/O; but i've not yet heard about specific products, except some LSI 1068E in IR mode; but reputable vendors like Areca (FW1.43) certainly require TLER-enabled disks or they will drop-out like candy whenever you encounter a bad/weak sector that needs longer recovery than 10 seconds."

im fairly sure u can enable TLER on black editions... google it.

 

[Questor]

Thank you for your reply.

I do not have an added RAID controller. This is the RAID that comes with the motherboard. There should be nothing extra needed other than setting the BIOS to RAID and the RAID drivers. If this had been an issue with a RAID Controller for a set up such as SAS, SCSI...etc., I could understand the TLER.

I have been building systems as a hobby since 1995. I have used on-board RAID solutions from the motherboard and I have used RAID controller add-in cards. I have used Maxtor, Bigfoot, Seagate, Western Digital, IBM, Hitachi, Toshiba and Samsung hard drives over the years in various RAID configurations. All the drives were consumer level and other than one Maxtor driver failure and two IBM drive failure, have never had a problem creating or maintaining a RAID array OR had an array cause a complete system problem.