Awful, Awful RAID0 performance on P4C800

[stormont]

I currently have two Seagate 40GB ST340014A drives. If I'm reading the ASUS P4C800 manual right, it looks like you can only plug drives you want to RAID into the blue connector that is near the bottom of the board. Since there is just one connector, this means the drives would have to be master and slave on the same cable.

I hooked both drives up in a Master/Slave configuration to that one port and created a RAID0 array including them. I used a 64kb stripe size and formatted the disk with NTFS using the deafult cluster size. Windows XP installation took 55 minutes and the other benchmarks I have done on this setup are awful.

One of the drives alone when not raided returns a PC Mark drive score of 1081. Both drives RAIDED return a score of 635. Awful!

So, did I read the manual wrong? Can you plug parrallel drives into any connectors on the board and RAID them? Or is the real problem that there is only one RAID port and having two devices on the same channel is slowing the issue down?

Would the better move be to buy two parallel to SATA converters and hook them up to the drives and connect those to the onboard SATA RAID connectors

 

[Zrom999]

Try clearing the reserve sectors and re striping the drives.

 

[stormont]

The BIOS of the built-in Promise controller isn't the most robust (FastTrak 378). How would I go about performing the fix you suggested?

 

[mechBgon]

You should have each drive in your RAID0 on a separate cable.

 

[stormont]

Problem with the ASUS P4C800 that I have is that it only has one channel for ATA133/100 RAID, so you have no choice but to connect both drives to one cable unless you buy some SATA convertors.

 

[mechBgon]

Exactly. So where is the confusion?

If it were me, I'd skip the RAID0 idea and use the drives as stand-alone drives.

 

[Zrom999]

To clear reserve sector go into the promise fastrak bios. Select view drive assignments. Highlight the drive and push ALT+F1 when it starts blinking hit CTRL+TAB. Do this for both drives. Might be different for you, check your MB manual. This is the fix for MBFastTrack133 Lite with the Promise PDC20276 control chip.

 

[stormont]

I'll give the reserve sector option a shot. There are a number of people running 2 drives on the same (and only) RAID IDE channel with this board and they are getting stellar performance. I've tried all their suggestions with no luck. The two drives are always slow than a single drive. I've tried HDtach, Sandra, Atto, and PCMark.

 

[whovous]

Can someone explain what is meant by clearing the reserve sector, and how it improves performance? I have the FastTrak bios on my Gigabyte board. It takes forever to boot, and it seems as though it wants to freeze for several seconds not long after I complete a boot. It does not happen every time, though. That would be too easy.

 

[stormont]

Clearing the reserve sector didn't help. I installed XP to a NTFS partition on a single drive and then made a ghost image of it. I ghosted that image to an array with a 16k stripe, 32k stripe, 64k stripe, and 128k stripe. Each time I benchmarked it using Atto, PC Mark, Sandra, and HDTach. Most times, the write speed using two drives in RAID0 was only a little faster than one drive. Every single time the Read speed of two drives in RAID0 was decimated by the speed of one drive. I've posted my ATTO scores here, in the hopes that someone can tell me why the read is so slow. The fact that there is only the one IDE channel available for RAID?

ATTO scores for each cluster size supported by the P4C800 onboard Promise controller