New RAID 0, 2x AAKS REALLY SLOW---please help!

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Valkadesh

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I just got my new cheap RAID controller (silicon image 3132) and 2x WD 640 AAKS hard drives in today. I installed the card and set it to RAID 0 with 64k stripes. Did a fresh install of Vista ultimate. I also updated the card's bios and drivers. I'm getting really slow readings from this array and i don't know what else to try. Does anyone have any ideas? I would expect these numbers to be ALOT better...right? They are the only 2 hard drives in the machines and the old SATA controller is disabled. This is on a quad core running at 3.4 ghz with 4 gigs of ram, not that it matters that much.

Thanks so much for any ideas!

Valkadesh
 
That doesn't seem "really" slow, remember, RAID 0 does not scale perfectly to 2x performance with two disks, there's always some bottleneck or limitation somewhere.

Speaking of which, are you hosting the RAID controller on a PCI RAID card?
 
that is a sata controller card, not a hardware raid card. the difference is about $100. you are running software raid.

don't expect a difference in speed between hardware and software RAID-0, in other raid types yes (5, 10, 6, etc).

the only difference you'll notice between hardware and software RAID-0 is CPU usage will be lower with hardware.
 
Yeah that's why i didn't buy a hardware card, heard it didn't make too much difference for RAID 0. I just thought my access times looked slow for starters, but if you think it doesn't look too bad, then maybe nothing is wrong....
 
I think you were looking for the numbers that are produced from short stroking your harddrives/array
 
I think things look slow to me. Yer getting almost no benefit from the RAID 0 and it looks slow to boot. My year old 500 gig 7200.11 gets 80 MB/sec average with a 12.6 ms access time.

Looking at your graph, I am almost sure you have a bottleneck somewhere after the drives because there is no falloff of speed to the right side of the graph. The PCI EX X1 slot should be good for at least 200 MB/sec. Maybe a bit more. 250 MB/sec is the theoretical limit for that slot.

Don't know if you just have a really crappy controller, or a driver issue of some kind, but it definitely warrants some further investigation.

Don
 
I've tried two lower end Raid0 cards (~$25), as well as Asus Drive Xpert, and they all perform "so-so" - much like the OP's results. I recently got a RocketRaid 3210 PCIe x4 card ($150msrp) - it is still software Raid, but its Raid0 benchmarks very similiar to ICH10R, >200MBs for a pair of SD6401AALS.

A hardware Raid card is not necessary for Raid0, but you still won't get solid performance without buying some quality.
 
Not sure what else to try....the drivers and bios supporting the card are the latest version. I updated the intel chipset drivers to the latest version. Everything "appears" properly configured. The hard drives aren't throwing errors, so that's clean. Maybe the card just sucks, but it got fairly good reviews on newegg for software based cards. I know it's not a 3ware or other high end controller, but i was expecting better results in RAID 0.

I can't think where else i'd have a bottleneck with my current specs, and of course the tool that one poster linked it borderline useless (thanks though).

Kinda stuck.
 
If that is PCI card then that would be about right .
Your maxing out at just under 133MB/s which is the bus width.

Those drives are definitely not performing at their best.

BTW what mobo do you have?
 
Does that mean I would get terrible performance with the onboard raid controller in my GA-EP35-DS3R?
 
Change the stripe size to 128K, might make a difference, might not, but in my experience it almost always ends up being the best choice of the available stripe sizes.
 
S3th13 said:
Does that mean I would get terrible performance with the onboard raid controller in my GA-EP35-DS3R?
Click to expand...

No, you would get better performance than a RAID card on a PCI bus,
For R0/R1 onboard raid is almost as fast a true PCI-e raid controller
 
Sorry meant to post this yesterday but the forums were up and down. The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA- P35-DS3L revision 2. Yes, the one without the RAID controller built in. My RAID card is a PCI-express model, so i wouldn't think that would be holding me back too much.

I did change the AAM on those drives, and it dropped my access times down a bit, but nothing has changes on the transfer rates and burst speeds.

Not sure really what to do at this point. Would another card really make that big a difference for RAID 0?
 
For a reasonable controller, your drives speed should scale at least 90% or so in RAID 0. So even in a PCI-EX X1 slot, your drives should be doing around 200 MB/sec. Not the 110 MB/sec you are getting.

Don
 
That logic makes sense, it seems that i'm barely getting any performance increase at all in RAID 0, except for maybe just a little bit more transfer rate speed. I did tweak my AAM and got my access time in the 12 second range so that's an improvement.

So i'm assuming the consensus is that even for RAID 0, my Sil 3132 controller is lacking?

What are the recommendations for a decent card then that isn't outrageously expensive? On my motherboard, the fastest slot for a new card i have available is a PCI-E 1x. The X16 is taken up by my video card....

Maybe the Highpoint Rocketraid 2300? or is there another suggestion the gurus might have!
 
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