Drive score seems low, help?

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Pumpkin Ghost
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Apr 24, 2005
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Hey guys, I build a new machine a few weeks back using the Asus Rampage III and the 640GB version of this drive in raid-0. I ran Crystal Disk Mark, and my scores seem low:

satae.png


Does this seem right for two 6.0Gb/s Sata drives in Raid-0?
 
I don't see anything unusual. Interface speed has nothing to do with actual throughput on a hard drive.
 
Well I downloaded those drivers, and ran the test again. The performance went down to 180/120. Not sure what's going on here. I have tried IDE, RAID, and AHCI in the BIOS. I can't get it above 190/135 now. Maybe I'll try the Marvell drivers next, under device manager, it sees the RAID set up as "MARVELL Raid VD 0 ATA Device".
 
Oops, I typed before I thought clearly. I have mine on the Marvell controller as well. The Intel drivers will help your other drives, not these.

On my board, the Marvell RAID setup is outside of the bios (hit ^M during boot I think), but you've already set it up. Did you use the default strip size? (Not sure if stripe size would make that big of a difference in transfer speeds, though).

One last possibility was if Windows was slowing down the drive with all the background stuff it does (indexing, etc).

I think I'll leave more detailed help to the experts here (I'm not one of them). I just posted because I had a similar setup so that you could compare numbers.
 
That doesn't look too bad for two 640gb drives. Raid 0 is not exactly linear scaling so not too bad.
 
RandomUserAZ said:
Oops, I typed before I thought clearly. I have mine on the Marvell controller as well. The Intel drivers will help your other drives, not these.

On my board, the Marvell RAID setup is outside of the bios (hit ^M during boot I think), but you've already set it up. Did you use the default strip size? (Not sure if stripe size would make that big of a difference in transfer speeds, though).

One last possibility was if Windows was slowing down the drive with all the background stuff it does (indexing, etc).

I think I'll leave more detailed help to the experts here (I'm not one of them). I just posted because I had a similar setup so that you could compare numbers.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the only thing I have on the Intel controller is my CD Burner. I guess it could be Windows slowing something down, although I don't see how that could be. The system as an I7 @2.8GHz, and 12gigs of RAM.

pjkenned said:
That doesn't look too bad for two 640gb drives. Raid 0 is not exactly linear scaling so not too bad.
Click to expand...

I guess I was just expecting more for the type of setup it is.
 
That's cool. I didn't know what was acceptable and what was not. Benchmarking aside, the system runs very fast, and is quite snappy. I was just curious as to what score it would get, and when I saw the score it seemed low to me.
 
You should use the faster 3Gbps controller and see your scores rise; you're now using the Marvell 6Gbps RAID drivers; which suck. Yes; 3Gbps is faster than 6Gbps in this case.

Your RAID0 does not provide any random I/O benefit according to your benchmark; the random read multiqueue read should be double that of the single queue random read; this is not the case.

Perhaps you should try again on the Intel 3Gbps controller and use a decent stripesize (try 128KiB first); also make sure the partition is aligned. You can check alignment with AS SSD; a benchmark similar to CrystalDiskMark. Google on it to download.
 
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Haha, so really there is no point in getting a motherboard with a 6Gb/s controller for now? I can live with that. I'll change the drives over to the Intel controller and download the Intel drivers again and rerun the test tomorrow. They system in for my office not at home, hence the Tesla c2050. Thanks for all of the help thus far guys!
 
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