P35C-DS3R gigabyte raid performance help

Yozzer

Yozzer

Yozzer

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Joined
19 Jun 2003
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134
Location
Macclesfield
I have just configured 2 seagate 320gb H'disks, (ST3320620AS), using the Gigabyte raid output on the M/B. I have set it up for raid 0, with a stripe of 64.
I am currently running in XP, and planned to reinstall Vista on the raid system, but I confess I am a little dissapointed in the performance when tested using HDtune 2.54.
As a single drive, I got an average seek time of 13.2ms, a burst of 115mb/s, and an average read rate of 62mb/s, but after setting up the raid, the seek time is identical, the average read time has gone up a bit to 73mb/s, the burst rate 117mb/s.
Is this normal, or should I be expecting more?
This is my first real go at raid, so I may well have set things up wrong, any ideas
 
The JMicron controller which drives the ports you're using isn't the best but it should be doing better than that. If you can stand re-installing again I suggest moving the drives onto the Intel RAID controller and using that instead.

BTW, you're sig is two lines too long.
 
Thanks for the input. I did as you suggested moving my drives around, and all is well now and have installed Vista.
Never noticed my sig had grown, reduced its size now OK
 
Hi Yozzer - I have the same board and same raid setup as you, and am getting a poor 65MB/s read speed on average! I also noticed that my RAID volume is almost always 100% utilization. I have upgraded the BIOS and reinstalled the drivers, but nothing makes a difference. I was hopin that I wouldnt need to change the disks, but if you are saying that is the only way forward, then I guess I have to!
 
Hi Stealthgeek, I had my intel chip set to IDE mode, and my raid set up on the gigabyte as posted, but was able to set the Intel option in the bios to raid, (without setting up raid at that time), and was still able to read from the disks in windows just the same. I then had to move the raid disks physicaly from the Gigabyte sockets, and move them to two empty intel sockets, and then in the raid setup made the two drives into a raid configuration. I therefore ended up with all the Intel sata sockets used up.
I did not try to use the two drives right away, but set up a new raid config. I am not experienced at raid, so they might have worked as they were already set up in the Gigabyte slots, perhaps someone more experienced could comment if that would have worked or not.
The difference was considerable, well worth the effort, and I was surprised that the disks I had set up with the Intel chip set to IDE mode, still worked and could be accessed when set to Raid mode.
Hope thgis helps.
 
Hi Yozzer - thanks for that, I will try to migrate over to the Intel sockets. Im glad it is actually the Gigabyte sockets and not something more sinister, like a virus or failing hard drives.

Ideally id like to test out performance on the 2 raided intel drives before going through the hassle of installing Windows, perhaps I will try to boot from something like Barts PE disk....
 
Hi Yozzer - I have now moved my drives over to the Intel controller and the difference is night and day - sequential write speeds are around 100MB/s compared with the 65MB/s i was getting before (this was in the Bart PE environment to rule out OS/driver issues).

Anyone else with the same board with RAID on the gigabyte chip - move ASAP to the Intel chip!!!!
 
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