WinXP / RAID problems?

[Wuzup101]

Hey all I got a wierd problem. I recently noticed my newely updated system now running WinXP (full format and reinstall not upgrade) is having some raid troubles. The drives perform flawlessly from a lack of errors stand point. And though they seem plenty fast, they benchmark quite slow for a raid aray in pcmark2k2 and sandra. Sandra puts them almost exactly on par with a single 7200rpm drive ata100. When I use to run win98 they were shown as being on par with sandra's 7200rpm ata100 raid0 system. I really don't understand what the heck the problem is. When I installed XP I used the most recent Raid drivers from Iwill's site for the the board (these drivers are still the most recent). I really can't figure out what's wrong with this dam system. The funny thing is I can't find the American Megatrends Raid drivers in my Device Manager. There is an AMI MEGAide scsi device in the "disk drives section" and an scsi/raid host controler in the scsi and raid section, but neither of these show drivers by AMI...they are both XP drivers. Anyway I just wanted to see if anyone had any ideas. I didn't change the array from when I had it running in 98. It's just using NTFS now instead of FAT32, and the stripe size has remained at 64.

 

[cleverhandle]

Have you 1) turned off System Restore and 2) defragged your drive before running the bench? The second, in particular, has a ridiculously large impact on Sandra scores.

 

[Wuzup101]

The drives are defragged every other week, even if XP determines it's not necessary. They are also defragged after a lot of new software is installed. I'm using rounded cables now...I think that may be the problem. I'm going to try some fresh 80pin cables when I get home from school.

Just bought myself a Fuji FinePix 4900 digi cam also... very happy

 

[cleverhandle]

Just for kicks, try defragging right before a Sandra bench. I've seen differences of 10K+ points on my drives, which are maintained similarly to yours. Which tells me that Sandra is not worth very much here...

 

[Wuzup101]

I will try it...but it gives me crappy scores in PCmark2k2 also...not just sandra.... I'm gonna try replacing the cables see if that works

 

[watts3000]

 

[Nothinman]

Are the 2 drives on the same cable?

 

[Wuzup101]

I tried new cables, now i can't even run windows. For some reason before getting to the windoz XP boot screan it I get a BSOD. It says I may either have a virus (which I doubt), or the harddrives (which are dynamic now...b/c i'm stupid and thought that might help) may not be terminated correctly...or something to taht effect. I'm gonna try loading win XP onto a 3 gig drive i have lying around and then recover my data from the raid array and reinstall everything.