ASUS A8AE-LE PCI RAID problem

[jack88]

I have a Pavilion d4100e with the following specs AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+/ 2GB DDR / 80G SATA Hard Drive, The MB is Asus A8AE-LE (AmberineM).
I recently bought two WD 74G 10K Raptor HDDs and a SIIG Serial ATA 4-channel PCI RAID Card(SC-SA4R12 / use SiI 3114 chip), thought I can have a performance boost by setup raid 0 for these two raptor hdds.
Hardware & software installation went fine, I connected the two raptor hdds to the pci rad card and set them up as raid 0, problem is when I run Sandra 2005 and HDDTach to test the speed of the hdds, they only give me around 60MB/S, that is approximately the speed of one hdd, something wrong with them, so I went to SiliconImage's homepage downloaded and upgraded the bios and the driver of the pci raid card, doesn't help at all, still poor performance.
So I abandon the hardware raid and setup software raid 0 using windows's dynamic disk feature, still give me poor performance, pretty much the same as using hardware raid.
I guess something wrong with this pci raid card or the motherboard, so I only connect one raptor hdd to the pci raid card, and the other raptor hdd I connect it to the sata port built with the motherboard, and setup software raid 0 for these two hdds. Ran Sandra 2005, give me 92MB/S, that is the performance suppose to have. I have tried a different brand and model PCI Raid Card, still same low performance problem. So I guess something wrong with the PCI bus of this Motherboard?
If anybody have this problem or have experience with this, please help me, thanks!!!

 

[pat]

The PCI bua has a limited bandwidth. So, all the devices connected to the system using the PCI bus is going to steal some from the PCI card. I don't know the rest of your config, and if you have any other PCI card od stuff installed. ANd the motherboard RAID is plugged directly to the system, bypassing the PCI bus. that couls explain the better perormance..

might be something else too...

 

[jack88]

The maximum theoretical bandwidth over a 32-bit/33Mhz bus is 133 Mbytes/second since assume continuous bursting with a 32-bit data object transferred on each PCI clock cycle.

I concluded there is something wrong with the hardware, because after thousands of test, I found out that a single raptor hdd connect to the PCI card can achieve higher speed than two raid 0 raptor hdds connect to the PCI card, so there must be something not right here, raid 0/two hdds connecting is slowing down the performance, there could be the card problem or the motherboard or the hard drives, hopefully it's the card, so I don't get in too much trouble. :roll: