RAID Problems

[Averyel]

Hey everybody, I have this really depressing problem. i'm running an ASUS A7v133 with onboard raid. I was really excited when i bought it. I then got myself 2 Maxtor 60GB 7200's to setup for Raid 0. Now I have been reading all over the internet about the big increase in performance and all that stuff. However when I setup the Raid and installed WIndows XP (don't have any other OS laying around to use, destroyed in a fire) and benchmarked it under SiSoft Sandra, my score is about 11000, which is shi**y compared to the scores that tey give me to compare. Even boot up is slower, and it was actually quicker on my WD 45GB 5400 drive! I've tried everything and my peak score would be like 12800. Now am I doing something wrong. I'm using 64k stripe size w/ 32k clusters. Could the Promise OnBoard RAID just suck with windows XP? Is there another way to setup my raid for maximum performance? Are they like special drivers that I have to use? Right now, i'm running win2000 RAID drivers from promise. Please, if anyone could help me, they would be a lifesaver. This problem is eating me up inside, especially since i the drives are brand-spaking new. I'll leave more info for you all to make a guess or assumption. THank you for your help.

Asus A7v133 rev 1.04
1 Ghz THunderbird w/ Vantec HSF
512 MB @ Cas3
2 Maxtor Drives on Promise IDE1 (Master/Slave)
IDE1----Toshiba 16x DVD and WD 45GB
IDE2----Lite-On 12x10x32 and ZIp 100
AGP-----Radeon 64 VIVO
PCI3----SB Live Value
PCI4----Realtek NIC

 

[tenest]

i do believe that drives that are set in a RAID 0 need to be on seperate channels (ie drive 1 as master on IDE3 and drive 2 as master on IDE4).

also, onboard RAID controllers use CPU cycles to handle the read/write operations of the RAID'd drives.

at least, this is what i understand, so i could be completely wrong...

 

[h0vic]

Definitely connect each drive to its own IDE cable. Boot up will take longer because your computer has to detect the RAID setup. Also, most Maxtor drives have their acoustic management set to quiet so they perform at their maximum speed. You can download thisutility here to change it, but you will have to connect the drives on the primary IDE channel and boot off a floppy for this work.