WD SE, poor performance on SIL 0649

[JackKane]

Hello there,
Does anyone have a WD 8mb cache drive hooked up to a Silicon image/CMD 0649-based HD controller? My performance seems to be much slower than the identical setup running on Promise's FastTrak 66. I have two 120GB drives in RAID 1.

Any suggestions? The only thing changed was the controller; the drivers are from 2002, I couldn't find anything newer. Cables and everything else is in order, drives are on separate channels, both masters. Running Win XP.

Thanks

[rankar7]

Have you tried installing Medley from SiL and tickering with the configuration that way? I'm running a RAID 0+1 with 4 WD 250GB drives on my IBM Netfinity music server at home and I'm getting decent performance.

I would start with Medley and see if you can achieve better results that way.

[JackKane]

Yes, I have installed Medley (the newest version I could find), and the only setting i can change is the Transfer Mode, which is currently set to UDMA 5. All caches are enabled, so it says.

Promise's Array Manager had a setting called "Enable Harddrive Cache", which was off by default. I remember that after I turned it on, there was noticeable improvement in simple tasks, like opening Explorer windows and doing other things at the same time. The benchmark software that comes with Symantec SystemWorks gave me results twice as high on harddrive tests with the Promise controller. I don't know how accurate that benchmark is, but relatively speaking the change can be quantified.

Thanks for your suggestion.

[rankar7]

Some more questions for you:

1. What RAID configuration were you using with the Promise controller?

2. What are the lengths of your IDE cables?

3. How are the new drives partitioned?

[JackKane]

1. Same, 2 of these in RAID 1. I swapped one controller for the other, using one of the drives as a master to duplicate onto the secondary.

2. Lengths are standard - 12"? These are stock 80wire/40pin cables that normally come with retail drives and/or controllers.

3. Each drive is split up into three partitions - approx 12, 35, and 66GB respectively.

Thanks

[rankar7]

Am I right in assuming that when you switched controllers, you re-formatted and re-configured the drives to work properly with the 0649?

Lastly, what type partition type are you using for the drives?

[JackKane]

NTFS on all three partitions.

Now, what exactly would "reconfiguration" involve that would make it work properly? The promise controller does nothing special to the RAID 1 array when it is created, in fact you can take any drive, connect it to a RAID controller and mirror it onto another drive. No reformatting required, that's the beauty of it. The array was rebuilt, yes, using one of the original drives as the master.
For RAID 0, that would be a different story due to stiping, most likely.

[rankar7]

No problem with having NTFS

As for the reconfig, I thought that you probably started the whole thing over from scratch instead of rebuilding from an existing drive (which definitely would have been the case if you had RAID 0 or 0+1)

That would've entailed creating the RAID set and then partioning all drives.

Here's what I would suggest as the next steps:

1. Go into device manager and make sure that you've deleted the old controller (I suspect the system may be searching for another unit, isn't finding it, then going to the Promise controller... I don't know, just a thought)

2. If you have another set of IDE cables, try swapping out the current ones for your spare set, trying to keep the ribbon cable as flat (non-twisted) as possible

3. If your BIOS has a setup for booting SCSI drives, make sure it is set to bypass altogether