imyourgodnow

I bought an Abit SA6R last year purely to use the RAID striping capability, as this is a secondary PC that I didn't want to shell out and get SCSI for. The manual is utter crap and doesn't mention anything about how to set up the array, so I muddled through it and it seemed to work.

I've never been happy with the performance, given it's using ATA100 disks and seems to be barely faster than my old ATA66 single-drive system. I got hold of the Sandra benching utility the ther day and ran it, and was shocked. The "Disk Index" was 5000-ish, and the number provided for the comparison with an equivalent system was ~36000. After a clean Windows install this has increased to 12000-ish, but this is still way below what I expect.

Does anyone know what might be up? Oh and please don't post if you're just going to say "RAID is ****....blah blah blah" - thats not any use to me now!

imyourgodnow

Do your research.....RAID offer three modes....striping, mirroring and both at once. Mirroring gives data redundancy by duplicating the disks, and STRIPING combines two disks into one, writing half a file on each disk (if you use 2 disks). Therefore the read/write speeds theoretically double. Caching issues limit the speed increase to less than a factor of 2, but the speed performance is increased significantly nevertheless.

RAID has been shown to slow performance below that which it could in theory achieve, but it is faster than using a single ATA100 disk.

Anyone else?

Friend of Bill

Ultra 160 and a Cheetah is way to go if you want drive speeeed

imyourgodnow

This is the arguement I can't be arsed having, which is why I said as much in the original post. Basically......

(a) I've had RAID before and seen it to improve performance.

(b) The Sandra benchmarks show it to generally improve over standard IDE systems.

(c) Hardware review sites (tomshardware, tech-gods, hothardware, many others) all reported better performance than with usual IDE setup.

I'm not anticipating SCSI performance here....I just want to get close to the performance it is capable of (see figures in original post), or at least to that of standard IDE drive setup.

Friend of Bill

Not trying to argue. RAID is stinks accross the board. I got an Abit BD7 raid and finally broke down for an Adaptec 160 card. Never looked back.

imyourgodnow

Not trying to argue with you mate, its catch23......I realise SCSI is the way to go - this is a secondary PC for my flatmate to use. Mine has an Adaptec 160 in fact - I don't intend on looking back either!

The problem here isn't me overestimating the benefits of RAID - the bloody thing is doing worse in benchmarks than an ATA33 at the moment. You can't tell me thats down to RAID being **** rather than something not being right. All I want out of it is at least normal HDD performance - might end up just spanning the disks.

stuy_b

Well guys I agree 100% with catch23 on this, your not gonna notice any big improvement especially in the "home use" environment. If your a business then RAID is useful, but for home users?!!.. its just another gimmick to try to make you buy the latest thing.. which is NOT necessary.. I actually look for NON raid boards now, but its getting harder to find .

Zedric

True. RAID is not for home users. It's way hyped. But RAID 0 does have faster WRITE performance than plain IDE and a bit better READ performance. RAID 1 has potentially slower WRITE performance, but the same READ performance as plain IDE. If you want to run RAID, run RAID 5. It's the best RAID if you ask me. Better performance, safe redundancy and good disk usage. (n-1)/n of the disk space is used on n disks (3/4, 75% on 4 disks, 4/5, 80% on 5 disks and so on). But then again it's not for the home user really.

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Bytes Back

Just to calm everyones nerves, have a picture of some relaxing kittens

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Zedric

Bytes back: Do you acctually collect these pictures or is it a new form of crowd control?

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Bytes Back

Heh

No, I dont collect them, get them from google, as a form of crowd control there second to none as everyones to busy going "Ah, look at the cute kitten" to be bothered to argue.

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Zedric

I think it's more of:
"I'll teach that b*stard! What a moron! I'll just read on...
...
WTF?? What are these kittens doing here? *reading* Uh, right... What was I doing? Aw forget it, next thread..."

But it works...

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Taurus

kittens are normally great and relaxing and all, but the one on the left in that pic is getting ready to lay some whoopin on the other punk-a** kitten who's bogarting his water.

with that in mind, raid 0 will give you a small increase in performance (starting xp, loading in games, av editing). but i had a raid 0 array for 2 months and it crashed on me and i lost everything. so without buying 2 more harddrives for 0+1, i don't recommend striping. you're bound to lose the array at some point.

imyourgodnow

Just to update people....it's a Highpoint driver thing. The XP one is ****e - I've now updated the Highpoint BIOS and full performance has been restored. Initial benching shows 1.7x the score achieved with a single ATA100.......