Problems with ATA100 RAID Controller

[iks]

Hello there,

Recently I bought ATA100 RAID Controller (Dawicontrol DC-100 UDMA-100 controller with Highpoint chip "HPT370") so I striped my two 80GB Seagate HDD drives in one 160GB Array.
Now in my case data blocks are written inteleaved between 2 disk drives, so the performance shuld be nearly doubled...
BUT the performance is actually really bad. I mean everything works so slow, much slower than before when my two HDDs were connected to primary master and primary slave IDE controller. I reinstalled my WindowsXP with no luck... It still takes ages (for exaple to copy something from one partition to another and when I am copying something everything else works really slow, for example I hardly open my email client when another application is accessing HDD at the same time.

Does anyone know what shuld I try to do?
Any tips and tricks?

I know it shuld work faster...

My configuration is:

- BIOS Setting Utility on my RAID card is version 2.31 (and can't be flashed to newer version),
- WindowsXP Drivers are version 2.34 (also tried 2.31 since same versions are recommended but with no luck)
- ATA RAID Management Software is version 2.31
- My HDDs are connected:
- one to primary master and another to secondary master on RAID controller (as it is said in User's Manual)
- My CD-ROM and DVD-ROM are connected to Primary and Secondary Master on IDE controller
- My CPU is Intel Pentium III 800EB Mhz
- My Mainboard is ASUS CUSL2-C (Black Pearl)
- 512MB RAM, ...

Thanks,
-Andrej

 

[ditchhopper]

Um... Your Seagate harddrives wouldnt happen to be the 15,000 rpm cheetahs would they? Windows xp has a serious issue with those drives when run in a scsi configuration, which is what your computer sees your raid as. If you do have the 15,000s you should run them independent since they blow the doors off most raid setups as they are. The sept. 2002 issue of maximumpc had an article on the problems with the seagates and xp.

 

[Zedric]

ditchhopper: Look carefully, "ATA100 RAID".

iks:
1. Keep the drives on separate cables, each as Master. This will improve performance at least a little.
2. Make sure UDMA is detected right.

 

[ditchhopper]

Yes I see that. But in order to boot from the array you have to have scsi set as the first boot device in the bios. Windows sees the highpoint controller as a scsi device. That being said you are definately correct about running the 2 as masters. Check your device manager under SCSI and RAID CONTROLLERS to see if there are any conflicts.

 

[Nick M]

Oh. God. 15,000 rpm.

* oh. I just got this...feeling shoot through me...when i saw 15, 000 rmp *

 

[spikemic]

zoom!!!!!!!!