worryin hdtach raid 0 results

Combat squirrel

Combat squirrel

Combat squirrel

Soldato
Joined
7 Aug 2004
Posts
11,342
hey all got 2 74gb raptors in raid 0 on nvidia NF4, results are for a standard 8mb test,

20.8mb's a second read, 8.1ms access time,

shouldnt the read be closer to 100mb/s ? :confused: stripe size is set to optimal, (64kb i think?)
 
That is a bit weird.

A while back my disk was producing errors in the event log for some reason. After 6 errors my drive would be put back to PIO mode (super slow mode) rather than DMA5.

Go into your device manager, right click>properties on your raid array(s)>"advanced settings", make sure it's at DMA5.

It it's not running at DMA5 then right click > uninstall > reboot & let Windows reinstall them.

The above definitely applies for non-RAID drives, not 100% sure if the same goes for RAID.

Craig.
 
any ideas ? hdtach is still worrying, installed vista on another partition, it gives 5.9 as the hard drive result, xp also 'feels' faster than 1 drive, but hdtach is going belly up, while the rest seems faster, hdtach in the wrong ? any other HD benchmark progs?
 
Firstly try the long bench in HDTach, the short one can sometimes smooth out the graph and hide the clues to why it's slow. Also try HDTune and see if the results are similar.

NF4 RAID setups also usually benefit from a couple of tweaks to the settings in device manager. You'll find the SATA controller in the SCSI and RAID controllers section, open up the properties of it and you should see tabs for the primary and secondary channels. On each tab make sure that both Enable Read Caching and Enable Command Queing are unchecked. It sounds counter-intuitive but for some reason turning the caching off makes a fair difference and the NCQ tries to outsmart the RAID controller and keeps giving it data out of order so turning that off reduces retries and improves throughput.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom