Slow Raid 0

[Guest]

Hello. I just built a new computer and the raid is slow, here are the components:

Athlon XP 1700
Soyo Dragon +
2x IBM 7200RPM ATA100
ATI 8500
Windows XP

If you are not familiar the dragon has the via k266a chipset. I ran Sisoft Sandra and only got about 22000 for the array. I should be getting about 35000 shouldnt I? The raid is made by promise. I also installed the latest via 4in1 drivers (4.37 i think). Any advice? Thanks for the help

 

[Ron_Jeremy]

Yes, you should be getting way more than those scores. Firstly, I think current IDE RAID (any level) is one of the biggest farces in the pc industry. But that is a whole other argumnet which we won't get into right now.

Regardless, I think you may want to ask VIA why your IDE scores blow > this is assuming you have all your hardware hooked up correctly.

This link (it's in German)

<A HREF="http://www.tecchannel.de/news/20011220/thema20011220-6291.html" target="_new">http://www.tecchannel.de/news/20011220/thema20011220-6291.html</A>

basically states VIA is admitting problems with the KT266a chipset & the PCI bus. They are "working" on the problem. Reading other forums on this matter, it looks like a firmware upgrade may not be the solution. Who knows, maybe we'll see the KT266a Rev2 boards soon. God that company is such a joke. I feel so sorry for AMD to have to pair their wonderful cpu's with the garbage VIA spews from its factories.

I have been lucky enough to use a XP1800 on IWILL's XP333R motherboard (ALI Magik Rev C chipset). I went through 2 days of hardcore usage:

> playing opengl & D3D games
> I swapped in/out:
4 sound cards (SBLive, Audigy, Phillips, Turtle Beach)
2 SCSI cards (2 different Adaptec's)
GF3 Ti200 & Voodoo3 vid cards

The system ran flawlessly on a piece of crap power supply (350W Enermax coming in this week). Do you think I would trade a few Sisoft Sandra points for some system stability? I saw 32 1/2 MB/s with 2 older Maxtor drives using ATTO's benchmark utility. If you want to try this utility instead, let me know & I will post it for you.

Good luck.

Cheers,

Ron_Jeremy

If you loan a friend $20 & never see them again, it was worth it.

 

[Guest]

Well i ran the ATTO test and got about 40-45 mb/sec do you think this is correct and Sandra is wrong or is it still slow? Thanks

 

[Guest]

Win XP, although I have no XPerience with it may have a DMA setting that needs to be enabled. Regular ATA100 devices perform way better with DMA enabled.

Just a thought

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
<b> If it beeps, It's still alive </b>

 

[Ron_Jeremy]

Well, I've always said Sandra is a inconsistant, inaccurate b*tch! The only thing she's good for is the ever "helpful" theoretical memory benchmarks. You really don't know how much I hate SiSoft software.
Try Sandra sometime with SCSI disks > it's enough to make you cry. She showed 48MB/s for 2 of my disks running software RAID, when in reality each disk does 40MB/s. Running the same test with HDTach or ATTO showed 77.5MB/s & 78.5MB/s respectively.

Cheers,

Ron_Jeremy

If you loan a friend $20 & never see them again, it was worth it.

 

[Ncogneto]

Are you running Fat32 or ntfs? What is your stripe size?

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!

 

[Ncogneto]

You might wan't to check out viahardwae.com and download the latency patch as well. Myself, I will avoid VIA chipsets like the plague. Every dam chipset they put out has one bug or another.

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the help. I will try out new via drivers when i get home from work. I checked and it is in mode U5 (ata100 correct?). It is formated with NTFS (only option i had) and the stripe size is 32k, do you think i should change this? Thanks again for all the help

 

[siranthony]

I also have an dragon+ MB. After reading this thread I d/l the patch. After the patch I got a drive index od 41904 in sandra. I diddn't think to take the benchmark before the patch though. My bench was significantly higher than any of the comparisons listed on sandra. By the way I have two IBM 7200 rpm udma5 30 gig drives set up in raid 0. After running the sandra bechmark internet explorer would lock up when I linked to this forum. Had to reboot. Did sandra cause this or is my system unstable? Games seem to run fine. While I'm bitching... Why are the toms forums so slow!!!

 

[svol]

While I'm bitching... Why are the toms forums so slow!!!

Think there are some server problems.

My case has so many fans that it hovers above the ground .

 

[jiffy]

Why are the toms forums so slow!!!

I notice it slow too using AOL, even with DSL. Just having AOL as a brouser on my computer even slowes down MSN here and Hotmail. I did a fdisk to make sure everything from AOL was gone. Then MSN was fast. Now I run, sometimes walk, but hardly ever craw.
So I guess if you have DSL or cable and use MSN you should be moving faster, but if you have another brouser that could be making it slow.





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