Slugish sound-related to Hard drives?

[shanevincent]

I have two WD 200JB drives and two Maxtor 160 gig drives, the Western Digital drives are connected to an onboard Promise 20276 port and set as Single, the Maxtor Drives are connected to a Promise Ultra133 TX2 card and set as masters I am using 80 wire cables and have tried the drives on both the end connector and what I usually use as the secondary connector, this has same configuration has been used on both VIA chipsets with a AMD Athlon XP processor and Intel Chipsets with a Pentium 4 processor.
I have tried several different combinations and motherboards and this is just my current configuration.
Using various sound cards there seems to be some problem with the sound, most noticablly the wave channel, where the sound stutters, this is very bad with products that are based on Creative's chips, but I can still occansionally notice a problem with a Santa Cruz card as well.
So my question is:
If I move to a single card solution,
1. Will my sound problems be resolved by using a high end raid card, such as, for example, the Promise SuperTrak100?
2. If I move to a high end raid card, is there any problems just keeping my drives "as is"?

I am leaning towards a 6 channel card, as then I can move to a raid 5 solution for each set of disks, but at the moment I need to know if this is a problem that can be resolved.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Napoleon]

Well, if it is some VIA chipset you're having problems with, you could try two things in addition to installing their latest <A HREF="http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=2" target="_new">4in1 drivers</A>:

<A HREF="http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=66" target="_new">RAID Performance Patch</A>
<A HREF="http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/817/8.html" target="_new">PCI Latency Patch</A>

Use at your own risk, particularly the Latency patch since it isn't official VIA stuff. Regardless, that stuttering sound hints at a problem with the PCI bus.

____
<font color=green><i>Work is the curse of the drinking classes. --- Oscar Wilde</i></font color=green>

 

[shanevincent]

Well actually I tried latency patches on the VIA chipset, and that wasn't resolved. The only common element between everything (Since I used both VIA and Intel Chipset solutions) is a Promise controller. I am going to test a HighPoint RocketRAID 404 and see if that can resolve the problem.

 

[Guest]

You never said anything about whether the stuttering is coincident with lots of HDD activity. That would be the test of whether or not it was related to the HDDs.

If it turns out that it is the HDD/controller causing it, you need to why it is happenning. For example PCI bus saturation problems, CPU work overload problems, etc.