Can anyone help please?

[Westend]

Hi,

I've posted this on three forums now and not had any help. Surely someone can shed some light on this issue. :)

I have a 2.4ghz P4, 1gig Dual Channel PC3200 DDR, ASUS P4C800 D Mobo, Dual 80gig Maxtor 7200 RPM SATA 150 drives setup in RAID 0 using the on board Promise 376/278 controller. Paritioned as FAT32, C:40gig, D: and E: 60gig.

Now NTFS but timings remain similar.. :(

Using Sandra, I've run the disk benchmarks with and without the Windows cache on both C: and D:

The results I get are: Bypassing Windows cache / Using Window's cache

Buffered Read (mb/s): (C: 90/81) (D: 85/78)

Sequential Read (mb/s): (C: 98/60) (D: 97/66)

Random Read (mb/s): (C: 9/10) (D: 9/10)

Buffered Writes (mb/s): (C: 7/7) (D: 7/7)

Sequential Writes (mb/s): (C: 5/7) (D: 7/7)

Random Writes (mb/s): (C: 8/10) (D: 8/10)

Access Time (ms): (C: 7/5) (D: 7/5)

Are these timings good? If not what could I change to improve on them? I've read the SATA review on this site and the Maxtor drive was putting out around 20 mb/s when writing. So what gives?

I've since rebuilt the machine using NTFS and added an old ATA100/UDMA5 40 Gig Maxtor drive to the Primary IDE. The SATA RAID results are now a flat 9mb/s writing but the old IDE drive puts out 25 mb/s, though the SATA RAID is 4x faster reading.

This is driving me nuts.

[BipolarBill]

http://www.storagereview.com/

Read up.

You're making two classic mistakes. You're usng a benchmark where you should be judging "by the seat of your pants" and (worse) you're using Sandra. Sandra is useless for real benchmarking. Try HDTach:

http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach

Besides, the Maxtor SATA drives are very new and not terribly fast. Western Digital, Seagate and Hitachi are ahead here.

[Westend]

Thanks a lot.

I have downloaded and run HD Tach 2.7. I'm trying to get a key so I can run the write tests but here are the results from my RAID 0 SATA.

I'd add the file as an image if I could figure our the vB code for it. So here it is as an attachment. :)

[Baddog]

Originally posted by Westend


I have downloaded and run HD Tach 2.7. I'm trying to get a key so I can run the write tests

And the plot thickens:rolleyes:

[BipolarBill]

The graph looks like the Rocky Mountains, but overoall performance looks fine.

[Westend]

The plot un-thickens hopefully. :)

Finally managed to get onto ASUS's site and downloaded a bunch of driver updates including one for the RAID driver. For a laugh I also downloaded the lastest version of Sandra, seeing that it is the only tool I have atm for checking speed.

Well if the results in the old version are **** then the new version is just amazing. I mean my 150 mb/s theoretical but impossible to achieve speeds were exceeded by many times. Sandra reports my SATA drives as reading at 981 mb/s. Well I'll lay that one to rest then. :)

Anyway I picked up a copy of Iometer. Fairly complex but at least it gave another insight into my disk issues. It reports that my read throughput is approx 94 mb/s. Using 64k data and a single thread. Writing the same data reports 84 mb/s.

So unless anyone can tell me to use another specific tool to check my write performance I'll lay this thread to rest.

Anyway here are the CSV "comma sep files" from Iometer if anyone feels the need to read. There's more data than you can shake a stick at.

Regards,