Poor Raid0 benchmarks for intel x25 g2

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RostaFarian

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Dec 1, 2008
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I am confused. Shouldn’t I be seeing read average of about 400+ for hd tune here? This is set up in a dell xps8000 raid 0 with 128 blocks on Win7 and the read avg is 250. Thanks for any Help.
 
You definately have a problem.

Reads should be in the 500 MB/sec range.

I know nothing about your machine but if you have an Intel chipset do you have the Intel Storage Manager installed?

It actually looks like it's a single drive. :confused:
 
Old hippie I love your screen name. When I installed win 7 I think it just used the default raid drivers. At this point should I reinstall the OS or can I just install those drivers now. I see that the Matrix Storage Manager is on my “dell drivers” cd.
 
I just installed Win7 64bit on two X25 g2's the other day, RAID 0. I used the driver from the Asus website and I get 525MB/170MB sequential read/writes. Of course that has gone down now that I've installed some apps/games.

I'm not using the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, just the drivers.

Did you align your partition when you created it? Check out this post as I read an improperly aligned RAID volume on SSD's can result in poor performance as well.

http://www.hardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1464343&highlight=raid+spreadsheet
 
Well I installed the Matrix storage manager and rebooted. Still getting the same results, however I see that the driver is Ver:8.9.0.1023 in the properties section of Intel(R) ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R/DO SATA RAID Controller. The instructions mention this…
"If you are installing the operating system on a system configured for RAID or AHCI mode, you must pre-install the Intel(R) Matrix Storage Manager driver using the F6 installation method described in section 5.3."

Should I just reinstall the OS?
Also should mention that if I use a larger block size in HDtune (like 512kb) then the read avg goes over 450(The default block size is 64kb in HDtune). But that's expected... right?
 
John I think that write caching post is more of a minor tweek, were as this issue is cutting my expected results in half.

Maybe I'll try a reinstall later. Just worried about breaking stuff.
 
Yeah now that I think about it more, I also think that the raid drivers during W7 install is probably the issue.
 
Well I reinstalled but this time I manually installed the intel matrix driver(Ver:8.9.0.1023 ) from a usb stick instead of completely skipping this step like the first time. Also chose to format during the install. Anyway I’m still getting the same HD Tune results as before. At a loss now.

One thing I did notice is that somehow dell is putting a hidden partition somewhere. Maybe that has something to do with it. Or could it be the motherboard is not capable? Also found out that the stepping option was not turned on by default in the bios. That seems strange, no?
 
Here is what HD tune looks like when I set HD tune block size to 512kb(compared to the 64kb default). Why is there such a huge variation in read performance with these settings?
 
Why is there such a huge variation in read performance with these settings?
Click to expand...

To tell ya the truth I didn't know they were there! :D

AAR, I just ran a test at 512 and it didn't make any difference.

Your latest HDTune chart is quite and improvement.

I'm assuming you're using a 128 stripe size and have the correct offset as partitioned by Vista/w7?

My G1s are pretty close with a 470-480MBs average.

One of mine is 6 months and the other is 3 months old, so as you can see they seem to hold-up fine under 8hrs daily use.
 
Stripe size is 128. I’m going to have to do some research on offset cause I have no idea what that is.
What’s bothering me is this secret Dell partition that is being forced on to the drive with my win7 Dell cd. Could that be affecting offset?
Also did an image restore with the win7 tool that so far seems to have worked flawlessly. Happy about that.
 
What’s bothering me is this secret Dell partition that is being forced on to the drive with my win7 Dell cd.
Click to expand...

IIRC, many Dell machines come with a hidden recovery partition and the owner is expected to make his own restore DVD from there. That's probably what's going on here.

Read this article about alignment and check yours to make sure.

Vista and W7 are supposed to align SSDs correctly but I have no idea if the Dell hidden partition would affect it.

Please let us know the results when you check the alignment.
 
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