RAID Controller Problem.

NachT · 17 Nov 2006 at 17:17

Just fitted my new controller, set up a Stripe with 2x Raptors.

And the speeds i'm getting using HD Tach, suck :eek:

Could anyone help me fix this problem, it's a SATAII card but SATA drives can work with it. It's PCI-e 1x. The reason I got the new card was because my onboard RAID controller didn't work unless it was at 35 C, and I cant be having that at this time of year

Saying that, my motherboard is one of the worst ( Pure Innovation ) and SiI3112 on that board give me better speeds that my new card gives me.

I think it's because the SiI3112 is SATA1, and my new card is SATA2. I also tryed the SATA2 controller on my board before I got the card, the drives worked at any temp so that was great. But the speeds I got on the SATA2 controller were the same speeds i'm getting with this card....

I was thinking of updating the BIOS on the card, but according to whats been updated on the latest BIOS nothing about performance is there.

Onboard 3112 Speeds: Burst - 130 MB/s : Constant 100 MB/s Read.
Addin RAID Controller Card: Burst - 82 MB/s : Constant 74 MB/s

Any help or suggestions would be much appriciated.

Is quite a drop

rpstewart · 17 Nov 2006 at 19:11

What make & model is the card?

NachT · 17 Nov 2006 at 19:42

Had a fealing you would be the first to replay hehe, I know you know a hell of a lot about HDD's and such.

It's a RocketPoint 2300.

I hope there's a way I can get the speeds I was gettings before.

rpstewart · 17 Nov 2006 at 20:06

NachT said:
Had a fealing you would be the first to replay hehe, I know you know a hell of a lot about HDD's and such.

Why, thank you

There's not much info out there on the Highpoint range unfortunately. The first thing I would check though is the cache mode that's being used, it should be "Write Back" for best performance. It should only affect writes but it's worth checking anyway.

NachT · 17 Nov 2006 at 20:17

Yeah Write Cache is enabled, I assume it's the same as Write Back?

rpstewart · 17 Nov 2006 at 20:30

I'm not sure if having write cache enabled on the drive is the same as having Write Back enabled at the array level - take a look in the Array Management view.

The only thing that's really springing to mind about this is how the array has been set up. Did you recreate the array from scratch when you moved the disks onto the RocketRaid card?

NachT · 17 Nov 2006 at 20:51

There's not many options for the array level. I only have the option to delete or unplug the array.

Yeah, I built the array from scratch when I moved the disks over to the new card. Although I never got the option to choose what size stripe I wanted when creating the setup.

NachT · 17 Nov 2006 at 22:44

Just an update with s screenshot, to give y'all an idea of whats what.

Thats 2x 16MB cache Raptors in RAID 0 :eek:

Looking at other peoples results with two raptors, mines 10x worse. Arg! I feel like buying a whole new motherboard, but if I did that i'd have to get a new CPU and RAM aswell

NachT · 18 Nov 2006 at 14:45

Ok, This morning I deleted the array and linked both drives back into my motherboard controller. I hadn't deleted that old array so I deleted it there too. I then linked both drives back into the controller card and set the array back up.

Reinstalled windows and done a new HD Tach.

As you can see, I can get up past 100MB/s. I couldn't get that befpre, but it keeps changing from 80 - 100 MB/s.

So i'm getting there

Just need to try for 120 MB/s at sustained instead of all over the shop.

Maybe it's somthing in my mobo bios, shal have a play around in there now.

EDIT: Just got this.

Sorry about keep flooding the place with screenshots, just trying to give yous an idea of whats happening.

Why wont it stay at those speeds instead of keep getting spikes of them

NachT · 18 Nov 2006 at 14:57

Ok,

THIS is a good example.

It's as if only one HD is getting the load, and somtimes both HD's in the RAID are balancing the load?

wth is wrong with it. :confused:

malcolm · 18 Nov 2006 at 15:49

Have you got any jumpers set on the drives? RAptors don't need any jumpers set on them.

NachT · 18 Nov 2006 at 16:38

None of the drives have jumpers on them.

I did try and set a few jumper settings to see if it would make a difference but it didn't so I took them back off lol :rolleyes:

I think it's a problem with my motherboard, not sure tho.

I'll send the rocketraid company an e-mail and see what they think.