Baracuda IV RAID 0 problem on Fasttrak100TX4

[Guest]

I’ve set up four Baracuda IV 20GB Drives on a Promise Fastrack 100 TX4 controller. The controller has four channels and I’ve set each drive as master. I set the controller mode for stripe, and the stripe size at 64KB. I went into WinME, installed the drivers and used the Computer Management tool to format the RAID drive as single 80GB NTFS partition. I ran the SiSoft Sandra Drives Benchmark and was surprised to see my raid drive operating at the same speed as my primary IDE Drive about 20 MBS.My performance is much less than expected. I get only 20000 !!! in Sisoft drive benchmark (I got around 25000 or so with a single Baracuda IV 20 GB drive!). I also only get 5500 score in Winbench 99 Business disk test, and only 15000 in the high-end disk test.
Now what could be the problem? Did I set up my RAID wrong? Is my controller card the problem? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Mark

 

[Lars_Coleman]

I have the same problem with performance in Windows 2000 (FAT32). I get a really low bench using HDTach v.2.60 and then if I put my Windows Millennium drive in there and run HDTach again it's a stream line butterfly. I'm not really sure why so I hope someone has some suggestions about that!?!

Have you tried to see what HDTach tells you? Keep in mind the latest version has some problems with Promise RAID controllers.

<font color=red>BIOS updates do wonders ....</font color=red>

 

[Guest]

I've got extremely bad news, and sadly I discovered this only yesterday after running benchmarks on my 3 Barracuda IV 40GB in a RAID-0 configuration.

There is no solution to our problem; the Barracuda IV appears to be too fast for ANY current RAID controller to handle and is hence USELESS in RAID-0 arrays.

I think this is the kind of news that should be reported on Tom's site.

For further info, follow this thread:
http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www.storagereview.com/jive/sr/thread.jsp?forum=1&thread=17380&message=178924

 

[Lars_Coleman]

Dude, that sucks! It's good information and something good to know.

<font color=red>BIOS updates do wonders ....</font color=red>

 

[Ron_Jeremy]

Ya, my friend spoke with Seagate tech support & they told him (I quote) "These drives are not optimized" for RAID. Kinda sucks. Still, I'd rather have a single WD1000BB-SE.

Cheers,

Ron_Jeremy

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

 

[Guest]

I am not trying to offend anyone, but I find that hard to believe. How is a drive "optimized" for RAID 0 anyhow? If they can be, what makes the ibm 60gxp's so great for RAID 0.

The only reason I'm responding to this is because I passed up buying 2 40 gig 60gxp's because I've heard too many bad things about them crapping out after a month or so (yes, you heard right...THE 60GXP's). Go to just about any forum and you will find a surprising amount of people complaining about them. I don't know if it's a firmware thing or a mechanical thing, but people are talking.

Because of these complaints, I went for 2 40 gig Barracuda 4's mainly for the reliability track record. My gigabyte 7dxr has an on-board promise raid controller and I was hoping to do a RAID 0 with them. I called Gigabyte and asked them what hdd's they recommended and they told me "don't get the ibm 60 gxp's or WD's" and recommended either maxtors or seagates.

Until someone proves me wrong, all newer hdd's are pretty much the same except some are built better than others and have better track records.




"If It Ain't Broke....Tweak It!!!"

 

[Ron_Jeremy]

IDE RAID is really useless to me. In fact I really don't understand why the 2 are even referred in the same sentence. If you really want to do RAID, use SCSI disks.

Yes, of current (tested) disks, the 60GXP's synch together quite well in RAID. But, they look to be heading down the 75GXP road to infamy with reliability issues.

The Fish do not do so well in RAID. I have personally spoke to Seagate tech regarding this issue & they admit being perplexed. Talking to one of the (supposed) Senior TSR's at Seagate, I was informed the drives "just do not like to work together in a RAID setup, with the <i>possible</i> exception of mirroring (RAID 1)".

I could go on & on, but would rather send you to <A HREF="http://www.storagereview.com" target="_new">http://www.storagereview.com</A> for your answers. The Fish are awesome drives. You should enjoy them as independent disks & forget about IDE RAID pipe dreams.

Cheers,

Ron_Jeremy

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