Slower Performance due to Raid 1?

[burnside]

I've had my Dell Precision T1500 with Raid 1 a couple years now. The past few months I've noticed the performance/speed slow down. I'm trying to troubleshoot what may be causing the slower speeds. My first guess is maybe the Raid 1 setup is finally taking it's toll? What would be the best way to see what the culprit may be?

Here are the specs on the machine:

Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80GHz
4GB RAM
2 x 500GB HDs (Raid 1)

Thanks!

 

[casper1973]

RAID1 should not decrease performance in any way unless one of the hard drives is failing. If anything, it can improve read times.

Don't be tempted to run a CHKDSK. It can potentially destroy the RAID data patterns.

When you say speed has slowed down - in what way? Data transfer speeds, start-up speed, general usage etc? Could well just be you machine getting bloated with software, old drivers, registry corruption etc. It happens to all machines over time. I like to re-install my machines at least once a year just to tidy up!

 

[burnside]

I thought RAID 0 was fast, but RAID 1 was slower because of the double writes.

I'd say general usage is where speed has slowed down. If I do a re-install, is there any thing I should know ahead of time because the PC has a RAID 1 config? I've done re-installs before, but they did not have any RAID configurations.