RAID 0 Problem

G

guy.joseph

New Member
Hi

I have just received a RAID card in the post today.

It was this http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220761288509&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT one

I want to use it with my 4 500gb hard drives to create a RAID 0 array of 2 TB.

I set it up with the auto configuration and then installed Windows (Vista Home Premium x32).

Before I installed the card, I benchmarked each of the drives, and all of them gave at least 100MB/s I/O rate.

Now, the array is averaging 10 MB/s, using the same benchmark!

The idea of using RAID 0 is to increase speed - I was looking for at least a 2x increase but I've got a 10x decrease!

What is going wrong?

  • Is the card not up for it?/Too cheap?
  • Is the speed limited by the PCI bus that the card uses?
  • Is it that I'm not using identical disks for all the drives (they are all 500GB)
  • Is it a problem in setup/chunk size/Windows Installation?
  • Is there something else?

Thanks

Guy Joseph
 
10MB/s is too slow to be the PCI bus limitation, make sure the controller isn't running in PIO mode or anything silly like that.

The speed will be limited by the PCI bus for sure, but this isn't caused by that (yet).
 
Hi

Thanks for a quick reply. How would I check if the card is in PIO mode?

I believe the speed limitation of Pci is 266mb/s, so I didn't think that would be the problem.

Thanks
 
PCI should be 133MB/s.

TO check PIO mode you'll have to view the controller properties in device manager. It should say on the advanced tab.
 
Hi

I have checked all of the related devices, and there is no option for a DMA/PIO mode. Any other ideas? I think I might try reinstalling with just a single disk on JBOD, and see what happens then!

Thanks
 
That's something worth trying, that should at least show you if it's the controller that is slow. I guessing you have the most current driver installed so that shouldn't be it.
 
Cromewell said:
That's something worth trying, that should at least show you if it's the controller that is slow. I guessing you have the most current driver installed so that shouldn't be it.
Click to expand...

It didn't make any difference, if anything it was slightly slower. I have now reinstalled back onto the motherboard's controller with a single hard drive while I sort it out. I am running a low level format on all the hard drives, to see if that's the problem, but since I got slow speeds on a single drive, I am pretty sure its the controller. Is there anything else I could try?

I'd read that this controller was meant to be very good for the price! I'm not so sure at the moment!

Any other ideas?

Thanks
 
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