RAID 0 questions with Asus A7V333 / Maxtor D740X

[gaviota]

Hello everyone,

I just bought an Asus A7V333 motherboard and 2 Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X 80GB hard drives. Both HDs are in a RAID 0 array setup for desktop use. Two 80GB hard drives should make a 160GB striped array, but Windows XP lists it as 149GB. Is the 11GB difference normal?

My other question is regarding a post I saw on which someone mentioned that in order to get better performance from the stripped array the USB 2.0 ports had to be disabled. Is this correct? If so, why?

Thanks for your help.

 

[Stain]

That is normal. It has nothing to do with RAID.

All hard drives read smaller in Windows or are in all actuallity smaller than they sell for The reason behind this is say you've got a 100gig HD *like me* we'll thats actually 100,000,000bytes and a "gigabyte" is not 1,000,000 its some screwy number that i can't remember like 1kb is not 1000bytes its 1024bytes I believe, so it turns out I only have 93.1gigs.

Its probably just a marketing scam that they sell the drives claiming 80gig when in reality your only going to get 74.5gigs!

Oh well, sue. GL!

 

[HammerBot]

Yep

1 KB = 2^10 bytes
1 MB = 2^20 bytes
1 GB = 2^30 bytes

Nice round numbers (when you view them with the binary glasses )

 

[papasmurf]

hehe you have discovered the base ten hard drive dellimma, the measuring of hdd space is rounded off to base ten so that it is easier to understand in the store or what not. in the old days of maybe 1 gig hard drives you would only lose a few megabytes but nowadays the difference has grown to gigabytes they had better fix this soon it is akin to false advertisement.

Introducing Tapeworms! The new big thing for weight loss!

 

[unoc]

Gaviota, it seems eveybody forgot to speak about the USB 2.0 problem of the A7V333 or, more precisely, of the chipset KT333.
I discovered a big difference when I enabled or disabled the USB 2.0 support. This because I run a check of my computer disabling and then enabling all device drivers of my system to find the reason of the poor performances of the RAID 0 array I realised on a A7V333.
After changing from a Gigabyte 7VTXE (KT266 A without USB 2.0 support) to a ASUS A7V333 (KT333 with USB 2.0 support) I measured the perfomances of my two Maxtor D740 80 GB which, before the chance, scored about 42000 and after the change, with a clean W2K install, they scored 35000 with SiSoft Sandra 2002. After several test even changing hard drives, I tried to disable the USB 2.0 support. Immediately Sandra increase the score of about 25%. I measured the highest value by using two IBM 120GXP 120 GB with a very good 53315 (FAT 32). Of course I tested also the transfer rate graph and I performed finally a Winbench 99 ver 2.0 disk winmark. I measured 21500 with business disk and 42000 with high end disk winmark. I don't know why USB 2.0 driver is able to "freeze" the PCI bus and I asked to VIA and ASUS, but I never received an answer.
I am now testing the new 4in1 4.4 in combination with the BIOS 1007, the RAID patch 1.02 and the USB 2.0.2 driver.

First question. For Hard Disk Drive producer 1 GB is equal to 1000 kB and 1 kB is equal to 1000 byte. But don't worry, because all hdd specifications follow this stupid rule, it remains always possible to compare hdd before to buy it.
Do you know why is so common the numeration with base ten ? and why is so common to give an approximation of 10 %
Because man has ten fingers

the last is in the past<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by unoc on 07/01/02 08:00 AM.</EM></FONT></P>