RAID 10 on ICH9R, will it boost performance much?

[fpbear]

My system is a bit sluggish. It seems to be mostly during disk reads, but sometimes it almost seems like it might be slow RAM memory (or maybe just WoW 64-bit latency).

My first easy target is to go after the RAID 1, because I know that disk mirroring is slow.

I currently have a RAID 1 setup with two 750G WD AAKS drives using the onboard Intel ICH9R controller.

I am trying to decide whether I should just add a couple new WD drives and change it to a RAID 10 config on the ICH9R, or if I should buy a hardware RAID controller card and use that for RAID 10.

Maybe the ICH9R is taking up CPU cycles?

I'm also considering if I should leave the RAID 1 partition as-is, and instead, set up another patition as RAID 0 as a scratch disk for things like the pagefile, temporary Internet files, video streaming files, etc.

Would a hardware RAID controller make much difference vs. the ICH9R for RAID 10?

My setup:
Abit IP35 Pro motherboard
Q6600 processor
8G RAM (5-5-5 timing if I remember right)
Windows 7 x64

 

[gtvr]

I'm guessing you've check for viruses?

You've got a nice processor, plenty of RAM. RAID 1 should actually be as fast as a single drive, or faster, for reads, and not much slower for writes. Yes, there could be some processor overhead.

How do you know it's slow - compared to what? Did it slow down more, recently?

Have you checked disk fragmentation? What do the windows performance tools show - high CPU utilization or not?

RAID 10 would be great for very disk intensive activities, esp video editing. Internet browsing, probably no difference. Paging is only an issue if the computer is doing a lot of that.

 

[fpbear]

I'm comparing with my previous desktop that I set aside.. that one has an older processor running the 32 bit version of Win 7 with the WD Raptor drive. It just feels a bit more snappy than my x64 RAID 1 system, even though it's older. I don't have any viruses (running NOD32) and defrag is on regular schedule.

I figured the older system feels faster because of the 10,000 RPM WD Raptor drive and the great seek time.

That made me wonder if I configure my system to RAID 10 if it would help, but the thought also occurs that perhaps the ICHR9 onboard RAID controller is stealing CPU cycles and maybe that's what I'm noticing..