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SATA RAID Performance poor and stripe sizes

P

PoopyPants

Guest
ok i havent searched well , ill say that up front, but forum search engines arent the best.
and my search is extremely defined.

what if any is the definitive must use RAID stripe size when setting up SATA RAID0
i dont think i have my specs listed anywhere but its an MSI 865PE NEO2 FIS2R w/ Intel ICH5 SATA controller and also a Promice Fastrak controller.

ive never used the promise controller but i have a feeling im about to switch over.

ive always used promise cards instead of the onboard connectors simply because i thought they performed better. but this onboard promise fasttrak SATA controller i have not tried.

has anyone a review or true real world (NOT benchmark) comparison of the perfomance of the Promise SATA vs the Intel ICHR5 ?

now down to the nitty gritty.

i have 2x Maxtor 160 gig SATA drives, they are set up as RAID0
1 - 10 gig partition for Windows 2k
1 - 10 gig partition for XP
1 - 290 gig partition for storage and where i install all my games.

the performance of these drives is well, shitty uterly and totally crap.
i would have to say they perform worse than my 120 gig IDE U100 drive i have on a Sil Ultra 133 IDE controller card. yeah sounds wierd but these drive perform like shite.

ive tried setting up the raid0 stripe size as 4k 8k 16k and 128k (there are more options i just havent tried those settings yet.)

and frankly none of them perform well.
i am on the verge of dropping them on my lenolium kitchen floor and then RMA'ing them
these ARE the maxtor drives with the B chip on them, and i have been told by a few of the great guys over at the MSI forums that these particular drives have issues, none of them were speed related but obviously something is wrong.

i have also tried 2 different sets of SATA cables. now the funny thing about these cables is that they fit VERY loosly on the drives and on the motherboard. these cables are the ones that came with the drives and the ones that came with the motherboard. ive asked a few buddies and their cables fit quite snug into the connectors, well mine dont and this too may be an issue although i doubt it otherwise i would probably be having alot of data and drive errors which i dont.,, ok thats not true there are times when i boot up and one of the drives is missing from the array i then just go into the setup and re add it and the system boots and runs fine., again another possible avenue for the problem.

overall im tired of these drives, they are slow, loud and making me frustrated.
and i thought SATA liquid bearing drives were suppose to be quiet,, yeah sure.
they arent as loud as some ide drives ive had before but the secoind time i redid my system and redid the raid stripe, they got very loud, i didnt do anything, i just redid the raid stripe.

so as you can see i have alot of simples surrounding one issue.
slow extremely underperforming drives.

has anyone an answer or a finger to point me in the right direction.
please dont send me to some web site that talks about simple raid setup and stripe set up, ive read them all, and truly its hard to find info on SATA RAID striping simpy becuase RAID is RAID no matter what the drive. and stripe size is stripe size.
im just wondering if the SATA drives need special setup or something i missed.

help me out fellas please.
 
bump cuz im a naughty boy lol

seriously though, anyone have any expert opinions of this issue besides rma them.
 
Do you know the exact model number of these drives? And secondly, SATA drives in RAID-0 aren't guaranteed to be better than a single IDE drive in most operations. It's been proven by several review sites that RAID only performs better for large file transfers. I have 2 Maxtor DiamondMax 9 120 GB SATA (6YM0120) in RAID-0 and I've had almost nothing but good fortune with them. Mine is on an Abit IC-7 using the Intel RAID drivers, so it can easily differ from your MSI with the 865 chipset.

Also, I have never heard of a software RAID being faster or more efficient than a hardware RAID, Promise card or not.

And I'm not judging you or anything, but what do you define as slow for a hard drive performance? IE: Major lag in milliseconds when loading a simple "My Computer"?

It really sounds like a disappointing situation for you though. I suppose the cheap, non-helpful thing I can add (just had to do it :) ) is to say to purchase a Raptor II drive or a Seagate Cheetah. Then, you'll know true speed in hard drive performance!

Dark Assassin
 
well im working on a set of raptors now thru my FS/FT thread.
getting rid of a 3.0 ghz laptop maxed out with everything (cept the video, couldnt afford better video at that time) wanting to trade it for some nifty hardware. lol

anywho when i first got these drive they were fast, then after time and they were full of "stuff" i decided to back up that stuff to another drive and redo these drives.

right after i formatted them, then deleted the raid array, then remade the drive array.
i loaded windows and instantly they were slower.

now here is a bad thing i totally forgot to mention is this

every oh i dont know 5-10 seconds the system hickups and stops for a 1/2 of a second.
its not consistant, but once it starts you can bet its gunna keep doing it. and rebooting it dont help.
if im moving my mouse around it just stops then starts again about a 1/2 second later.

games i havent seen it happen to ,, mostly while im using any program within windows, , dont have to be a microsoft program. just any program.

have you or anyone seen any difference performance wise between the Intel ICHR5 or the Promise TX SATA controller ?

id have to yank out the drive to get you the model number. i had it writen down once. but no longer have it.
but they have the B model chip on them that was supposedly a bad drive to have.
 
I have a pair of 74GB Raptors on my ICHR5, running Raid 0, boohoo all you want, but these things are insanely fast. Please post the benchmarks that say I'm lying, they were done with 36GB Raptors, got 5 of em, tell me a story. I would never recommend that anyone be as stupid as I have been, but the 74GB Raptors are definetely worth the price difference.2 of these babies, outperform my 5 36 GB raptors any day , and twice on Sunday. I move vast amounts of data into and out of the CPU daily, and would never consider a single drive solution again. The numbers on a Diamondmax loook impressive, until you realize that they fail quite often. Please assume I am lying, You're probs posted in the next year, willl prove my point.
 
ok leadman thank you for that ranting which has nothing to do with my thread, but thanks, i guess maybe i need to spend 180 bucks for 1 74 fuvking gig drive fuvck that.

ok anyone want to seriously look at this thread i have a serious performance loss here and i have 2 avenues to go down, rma the drives, or dig deeper in RAID and find out what stripe set is the best performing. then reload my stupid system again and hope it works.
 
well i reloaded and redid the raid array using the promise onboard SATA controller. and even though i cant say for sure if they are performing better the stuttering has definately gone away. it didnt when i redid the raid array on the intel ICH5 chipset, so either something is screwed up with that chipset or the driver for that chipset is fooked.

so ill be testing it here maybe tommorrow to see how things go.

i get my fresh brand new 9800 XT from ATI RMA tommorrow(i verified it as new and not used remanufactured from inventory) (i paid for the pre-ship rma, ok i didnt pay i put a CC down for security) and also my new Logitech MOMO steering wheel comes tommorrow too. im pumped about both, i want to see how things like richard burns rally runs on that wheel, i dont care for the game simply cuz its the same as Colin McRae rally, ,,, highly highly over exaggerated steering and sliding which totally ruins the game.
but i want to throw some games on here and check it out, anyone got any idea what games actually allow the real steering force feedback to work (real as in steering wheel friction and jerking).

anyways offtopic, sorry, ill check out how the games are loading and suck,, so far it dont seem better, speed wise, just stable. which is fine by me.
and no i havent checked them out without raid. maybe next time i redo the drives ill try it without raid.
 
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