RAID 0 on Promise Fasttrack Speed P4C800-E Deluxe
Doug Sterlina
(300 MB/s) drives. I have a P4C800-E Deluxe which I know only supports
SATA I. I set up a RAID 0 array last night, installed a fresh copy of
Windows Vista Beta 2, and have been running tests with HD tach 3.0. My
burst speed for the drives is only about 107 MB/s where my ATA133
Maxtor gets about 115 MB/s. The average read speed for the RAID array
is double what the Maxtor is, about 80 MB/s, but I still expected the
RAID to have much higher burst speed. In theory it should be 300 MB/s
but I'm not even getting the burst speed of a single ATA133 drive which
is upsetting. I just flashed my BIOS and disabled legacy USB support
because I read that might help. I have ran the test a bunch of time.
The promise drivers are the latest ones. Any help?
Doug Sterlina
"clinical conditions" but what I am getting is worse than EIDE
technology. Right?
Mutley
Just as a matter if interest why raid 0 ?? No data security..
Mick Sitton
"Doug Sterlina" <bigdo...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1154388394.1...@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
133MB/s tops
it dosen't matter how fast your drives/array is, unless you use a faster bus
(64 bit/66Mhz, PCI-X etc)
after you subtract command overhead the max throuput is about 120MB/s
i'd say with 115MB/s your doing pretty well
Paul
<nos...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> "Doug Sterlina" <bigdo...@gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1154388394.1...@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> > Alright, I just bought 2 new 320gig western digital 16mb cache, SATA II
> > (300 MB/s) drives. I have a P4C800-E Deluxe which I know only supports
> > SATA I. I set up a RAID 0 array last night, installed a fresh copy of
> > Windows Vista Beta 2, and have been running tests with HD tach 3.0. My
> > burst speed for the drives is only about 107 MB/s where my ATA133
> > Maxtor gets about 115 MB/s. The average read speed for the RAID array
> > is double what the Maxtor is, about 80 MB/s, but I still expected the
> > RAID to have much higher burst speed. In theory it should be 300 MB/s
> > but I'm not even getting the burst speed of a single ATA133 drive which
> > is upsetting. I just flashed my BIOS and disabled legacy USB support
> > because I read that might help. I have ran the test a bunch of time.
> > The promise drivers are the latest ones. Any help?
> >
> Your overlooking one important fact; the 32 bit PCI bus itself
> it limited to 133MB/s tops. it dosen't matter how fast your
> drives/array is, unless you use a faster bus (64 bit/66Mhz, PCI-X etc).
> after you subtract command overhead the max throuput is about 120MB/s
> i'd say with 115MB/s your doing pretty well.
The Promise PDC20378 is on the PCI bus. 115MB/sec of a potential
300MB/sec burst from the two disks is all you will get, due to
the practical limits of the PCI bus burst transfers.
The Southbridge is connected to the Northbridge via the Hub
bus. The Hub bus is rated for 266MB/sec. Certain of the peripheral
interfaces on the Southbridge are bridged to that bus, including
the SATA ports. The SATA ports on the Southbridge should give
better performance. Now, I don't remember all the benchmarks, but
the best sustained may have been about 140MB/sec or so. The
140MB/sec number, or whatever it was, was high enough to conclude
that the SATA on ICH5R, are indeed sitting on the hub bus. I don't
know what the burst spec was for the Southbridge in RAID 0.
Stripe size 16K to 32K, might give good numbers, but with a
cost of up to 7% CPU.
This benching attempt is mediocre at best. The problem with
digging up the best results again, is the pictures are no
longer on the image server they were staged on (that is one
of the perils of private forums, with no permanent image
storage facilities). A number of people benched Raptors, but
the resulting pictures are gone.
http://www.overclockers.com.au/article.php?id=179581&P=2
In the early days of SATA, the controller board was an ordinary
IDE board, with a IDE-SATA adapter added. That (non-native) way
of doing things, caused less than 150MB/sec rates to be achieved
for bursts (you would not expect to see more than 133MB/sec). Now
that there are SATA II drives, the use of bridge chips should
really be over.
HTH,
Paul
Doug Sterlina
am using RAID 0, it is because I plan on partitioning off a big chunk
of it and having all that data backed up onto another drive as well as
being on the RAID. The main partition will be for windows which I could
care less if the drives died and I have to reinstall. I normally do a
complete reformat every few months anyways. So, according to Paul, if
it switch over to the intel ICH5-R controller I should get faster
speeds.
Questions:
1. I noticed that there are no special drivers mentioned in the ASUS
manual so once I make the array windows should be able to find the
drive when I go to install it?
2. The manual says use 128K chunks for performance but I have read that
most people suggest 64K, is this because of CPU usage?
3. Also, if I partition off 100 gb for my windows install and the rest
for data, in the future could I reformat and reinstall windows without
the rest of the data being harmed?
4. On the Asus site while looking for the Intel RAID drivers I found
these 2 programs. Are either of them needed to set up the array on the
intel ICH5-R controller? Would I install them before or after windows
was installed?
Intel(R) Chipset Software Installation Utility V5.01.1015. (I have
never installed this before, but just read up on it and I think I
probably should, right?)
Intel(R) Application Accelerator RAID Edition 3.5R for Windows 2000/XP
Doug Sterlina
size really well, sorry I didnt catch it earlier. That question can be
ignored.
DaveW
your motherboard does NOT support SATA II. Sooo, why would you expect to
get 300MB/s for a transfer rate using an SATA II harddrive?
P.S. Even if your board did support SATA II you need to know that the 300
MB\s transfer rate that you mentioned is a theoretical maximum and is
actually unobtainable in the real world.
--
DaveW
----------------
"Doug Sterlina" <bigdo...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1154388394.1...@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
Doug Sterlina
rate, so 150x2. I didn't expext anywhere near 300 or even 200 for that
matter, but I did expect the burst rate for the RAID 0 array to be
faster than the burst rate for a single EIDE 133 drive. HD Tach shows
115 MB/s for the EIDE drive and only 107 MB/s for the RAID 0 array. I
have done further research and learned that the Promise controller is
on the PCI bus and is limited to something like 120 MB/s so I plan on
switching over to the Intel ICH5R controller this weekend which should
allow for around double the burst rate.
These are the drives in the RAID array if it helps any.
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=196&language=en
Doug Sterlina
with 103.2 MB/s average. Much better and more like what I expected.
Thanks for the suggestion.