Promise TX4310 an Vertex 2E drives - please help!

[AceCobra1]

Hi all,

I recently bought 4 SSDs and the Promise TX4310 raid card... I read that the performance in terms of the read speed should increase almost in parallel with the number of drives attached. The RAID card is currently stuck on a Asus P5DWH motherboard on the PCI slot and I belive it is running at 66MHz. Anyway, I downloaded crystal mark disc to check the performance of the RAID 0 where 4 OCZ 60GB Vertex 2E discs are attached and I am still getting a super low score of about 115MB/s read and about 97MB/s write...? That is testing it between 100MB - 4000MB sequential reads... I am getting fairly persistant scores...

I know the box said that the max bandwitdh for this PCI card is 266MB/s burst. The OCZ is capable of 285MB/s read... so surely the theortical limit is 285MB/s x 4 discs since it is on RAID 0... Any ideas why I am getting only 115MB/s read? Anything to do with the motherboard?

Also, I can't seem to run Windows 7 x64 on this raid... I can only run x32 which obviously I guess would be a bit of a bottleneck... Any ideas would be much appreciated

 

[AceCobra1]

Oh, and I'm going to add that I'm using the Q6600 processor although I doubt that is going to make much of a difference...

I have components for my 2500k but I'm waiting for barbs for my cooling block...

Also, my laptop running an i7-720qm with a 256GB Samsung SSD is producing a 200MB/s+ read speed... actually boots windows in half the time so not quite sure what is wrong with my desktop? please help

 

[clarkjd]

I know the box said that the max bandwitdh for this PCI card is 266MB/s burst. The OCZ is capable of 285MB/s read... so surely the theortical limit is 285MB/s x 4 discs since it is on RAID 0...

I don't think that it works that way...The 266MB/s is the limit of the PCI buss, so I would think that that would be the max, whether you had 1 drive or 20!

 

[AceCobra1]

I was about to buy Adaptec 1430SA x4 Port SATA II (300mbps) PCI-E Raid Card *Oem*

Since it runs on the PCIe and says maximum bandwidth is 300MB/s I'm guessing that is per PORT and not the total bandwidth

 

[AceCobra1]

The Promise TX4310 has a PCI interface which claims to run at 66MHz with a total burst of 266MB... so I'm guessing max read would be 266 x 4 ?

 

[clarkjd]

I was about to buy Adaptec 1430SA x4 Port SATA II (300mbps) PCI-E Raid Card *Oem*

Since it runs on the PCIe and says maximum bandwidth is 300MB/s I'm guessing that is per PORT and not the total bandwidth

I would verify that with Adaptec before I depended on it. Maximum is usually the max for the device...

 

[AceCobra1]

I just connected the 2x Vertex 2E to the SATA 3 on the P8P67 motherboard... the Vertex 2E says that it has a read speed of a maximum of 285MB/s... When I ran crystaldiscmark on it, it only gave a result of 203mb/s for and indivual disc and with I raid 2 disc together into raid 0, I am only getting a 360MB/s read... Is that normal or is there a bottleneck? I'm running the 2500k as well as 8GB of vengence ram

 

[clarkjd]

The P67 motherboards have an issue with the SATA ports. Those boards are no longer available until INTEL can get a fix for the chipset, at which point they will be recalled. That may explain your issue..