HDD Subsystem: SCSI-160, SATA Raid-0 are dogs. Real-world ..

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Hi All,

I have a fairly decent system built with current, name brand components, but
my HDD sub-system still runs like mud. SATA Raid-0 only gets 85MB/s and
SCSI-160 gets 43MB/s.

I have done all of the usual things to improve HDD performance (no indexing
service, no performance counters, regular defrag with Perfect-Disk, etc.),
but still no luck making real improvements. I am also considering my annual
OS rebuild, which I haven't done in a few years......but first I'd like to
know if my current system is bottlenecked with something stupid that I've
missed.

I'm pretty anal about keeping up-to-date with AV, OS Patches, drivers,
defrag, backups, and cursory performance tuning, but I still don't seem to
get the performance that is capable with this amount of hardware. Any help
and opinions is greeatly appreciated.

Sandra Benckmarks:
SCSI drives = 43MB/s without Win/2K cache, 28MB/s with cache
SATA Raid-0 drives = 85MB/s without Win/2K cache, 33MB/s with cache

OS = Win/2K
MoBo = Intel D865PERL (800Mhz FSB, 400Mhz DDR, Hyper-Thread)
RAM = 1GB Dual-Chan DDR 400Mhz
Proc = Intel P4 - 2.4Ghz (800Mhz FSB)
HDD1 = 36GB Hitachi/IBM 73LZX, 10K, SCSI-160 (Connected to Adaptec 19160 via
68-pin cable)
HDD2 = 36GB Hitachi/IBM 73LZX, 10K, SCSI-160 (Connected to Adaptec 19160 via
68-pin cable)
HDD3 = 240GB Raid-0 SATA (2x 120GB Seagate ST3120026AS) (Connected to MoBo
Intel controller)
File System = NTFS on all drives
RAID = Stripe size - 128K,
There are no other devices on the SCSI or SATA controllers.
My current setup has the OS on SCSI/HDD1 with all of my data on SATA/HDD3.
The 2nd SCSI/HDD2 is used for swap file and \Temp storage.

Even with the limitations of a 32Mhz PCI bus, shouldn't my raw throughput be
better than this with the SCSI-160?

Does anyone get better performance with either of these 2 HDD setups?

I want to configure this box for performance, so I'm re-thinking the
configuration of where I load the OS, Appls, and data. Is it practical, or
even possible to put the Applications ("\Program Files" and "|Documents and
Settings" ) on a faster drive than the OS? Does separating the OS from the
Appls make any sense? How about creating another Raid-0 with the 2 SCSI
drives, and installing the OS on that setup?

Obviously there's a lot of variables with HDD performance, but I'm not doing
anything outrageous with the configurations, so i'm kind of stumped. Any
help, opinions or tips are greatly appreciated.

TIA
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