A8N-SLI and using SATA RAID1 with onboard Silicon Image 3114

[imported_BIOSMonkey]

OK, so I built a new system with a 74GB SATA Raptor as the boot drive, and two 160GB SATA Hitachi drives in RAID0 on the nforce4 chip.

I also have two more Hitachi 160GB drives in RAID 1 on the SI 3114.

I noted when I first created the RAID 1 array, the SATARAID5 utility would start up on XP boot showing the array in yellow, and performance on this volume was really poor.

I came to learn later that yellow means 'reduced', and the system is "restoring redundancy" in the background. Since it is a new system, I have not been leaving it on all the time. But after learning this I left it on overnight and found that it took 5 freaking hours to go back to a normal (green) condition.

So after this was done the array performance went back up to an expected level.

Well, I have been leaving the system in standby mode. Yesterday, our power blinked out for a few minutes, which cut the system off (from standby). After rebooting, the f'ing array was back to yellow, and task manager said "restoring redundancy"! Oh boy, I get to wait 5-6 hours with crappy performance on the raid array while this thing rebuilds itself.

What the FUDGE is this thing doing? I'm using maybe 5gb on this drive right now, why does the redundancy fail when it wasn't even doing anything, and WHY IN GODS NAME does it take 5 fracking hours???? How is the utility determining when the array is 'reduced'??

Is this chip just a POS? Did I set it up wrong??? I bought this board specifically so I could have this raid config.

 

[NokiaDude]

Honestly, drive performance outside of XP is slow on the A8N-SLI Deluxe no matter which controller you use. I believe it's a firmware problem. A complete drive to drive copy takes FOREVER (6-8 hours) on my computer. When a computer with a KT400 chipset copies 80gb in about an hour.

 

[mofrack]

Originally posted by: NokiaDude
Honestly, drive performance outside of XP is slow on the A8N-SLI Deluxe no matter which controller you use. I believe it's a firmware problem. A complete drive to drive copy takes FOREVER (6-8 hours) on my computer. When a computer with a KT400 chipset copies 80gb in about an hour.

This isnt the case for me.

I have the same problem with my 160GB Maxtor RAID 1 array on the Silicon Image controller. There seems to be a problem of some kind with how the controller manages RAID 1 volumes. If you were to setup a RAID 1 mirror on the NV controller instead, this would prove my point. ONLY the Sil controller is taking 5 hours to restore redundancy to a mirrored array, and ONLY the Sil controller makes the array "dirty" (therefore, wanting to rebuild the ENTIRE MIRROR) when waking the machine from sleep.

So yeah, either the implementation of the Sil controller has something screwy with RAID 1 volumes, or sleeping/standby is messing up the mirror for some stupid reason...