Why Is My Raid Striping Setup Slow?

[Navior]

hi everyone


i was hoping there is somebody else out there who has tried this setup and can help me, i have a ga-7vaxp mobo and just se it up with raid striping for performance, with two 80 gig western digital 8mb cache drives. it took me quite a while to figure out how to setup my raid with windows (copying the drivers off of my gigabyte mobo CD onto a floppy, and then using the floppy while installing windows) because the manual is so skimpy. so now, i think i have it setup right. i have my two wd hardrives plugged into the IDE 3 and 4 I/O slots on the mobo, and the hardware manager in windows says my drivers and device is working (fasttrack)..

But heres the hitch, i've run sisoft sandra and my raid array is much much slower then it should be when i benchmarked it, my old 30 gig diamond max 8 is almost as fast! my array is runnign at the speed of just a single WD 80 gig 8 mb cache drive? WTF is going on?? did i set it up properly? why is it so slow? does anybody else have this setup? how did u set it up?? thanx

p.s. it also seems i am another victim of the shoddy northbridge fans on the ga-7vaxp, mine makes terrible noise


my setup

athlon 1700xp O/C'd to 2400xp
ga-7vaxp mobo
geforce4 ti 4400
x2 WD 80 gig 8mb cache hardrives + 1 maxtor diamond max 8, 30 gig
512mb ram
XaserIII case

 

[StraightPipe]

check out this about stripe sizes. I'm not really sure, but if your stripes are too big, then small files wont get a speed bonus and if they are too small then your pc will spend too mauch time spliting the stripes. so you might have to make some adjustments.

 

[Navior]

thanx i'll check out my stripe size, but i think it must be pretty out of whack to get such low results, sisoft's sandra is usually dead on with its benchmarks