Very Poor Performance on Promise 20378 RAID

[telcart]

I recently purchased a 500 GB SATAII hard drive and connected it to my motherboard's Promise 20378 RAID controller. I'm already using both non-RAID SATA so I had no choice. The performance is atrocious, when downloading torrents the whole system is bogged down and the speakers will pop and crackle with digital noise. I've tried several drivers but cannot get this controller to perform. According to a benchmark, the 500gb drive is my system fastest hard drive - but it really doesn't seem that way.

See sig for specs.

[Train]

Get a non-RAID SATA controller card and install and use it.

[Sterling_Aug]

Did you install the mobo chipset drivers that include the Promise RAID controller drivers yet?

What does device manager show for the Promise controller? Are there any yellow exclaimation points?

[telcart]

I'm using the 2003 non-RAID driver from the ASUS web site right now. I can't find an OEM driver from Promise anywhere. I've tried various other drives from Driverguide and none are compatible... just the slow one.

[Sterling_Aug]

I'm using the 2003 non-RAID driver from the ASUS web site right now. I can't find an OEM driver from Promise anywhere. I've tried various other drives from Driverguide and none are compatible... just the slow one.

I asked if you loaded the mobo chipset drivers yet, not the RAID driver.

[Midknyte]

I'm assuming this is on the motherboard in your sig.

Did you try setting the SATAII drive to SATAI mode? Make/model of the hard drive would help.

[telcart]

I asked if you loaded the mobo chipset drivers yet, not the RAID driver.

My mistake, yes I have installed the most recent Intel INF drivers. I keep my system updated and running well, usually sticking to the latest OEM drivers for everything.

I will try using SATA1 mode instead, but I doubt it will fix things. I had the exact same problem when using a 160 GB IDE drive on the same controller. Horrible performance and major glitches in sound when trying to multi-task.

[Sterling_Aug]

Then I would replace the card.

[Midknyte]

It's the onboard RAID, if I'm not mistaken.

Since it's not a native chipset RAID, it's using PCI bus. It will have to share the PCI bus with other devices, including your sound card. If you have another device taking up the PCI bus (like your sound card), then your RAID performance will suffer.