Raid 0....

skeptic

Hey all, found your forum...and it's very informative. Nice place.

I am somewhat of a n00b at RAID arrays. I am running a RAID 0 array with a Promise TX2000 card and 2-80GB WD 8MB (PATA) drives.

I was wanting a comparison to others who have this type of setup (or comments). I just got done changing the cluster size on my disks, and don't see much of an improvement. I actually expected MORE I/O speed, but I'm not seeing it. At another forum I go to, I see their scores on ATTO....without a RAID (and running PATA drives)....and they come close to my output...even exceeding it sometimes. That's just plain wrong (especially after spending the money to get more speed).

The RAID 0 is running a 32K stripe with 16K cluster.

fatcat

yea..low writes...try 16/16 and defrag if u have stuff on the drive...of course if ur raid0 is ur c drive, formatting is required

Tex

fatcat wrote:

yea..low writes...try 16/16 and defrag if u have stuff on the drive...of course if ur raid0 is ur c drive, formatting is required

Tex

You should be around 100,000 on reads and maybe 85 to 90 thousand hopefully on the writes. You got probs somewhere. Thats not worth risking data loss in raid-0.

Here is one of my 120gb Maxtor 8mb cache ide drives when it's set up correctly.

Tex

skeptic

Isn't the read scores a bit low for my setup, also?

50,000+ doesn't seem fast enough....

This is in NTFS format. Tried FAT32, but there was no improvement. In fact, everything I have tried has led to slower I/O read & write outputs.

skeptic

So, you're also saying, Tex, that I should try the 16k stripe/16k cluster size?

Thrax

Yes. You should ideally be running 16k stripe/cluster.

Tex

skeptic wrote:

Isn't the read scores a bit low for my setup, also?

50,000+ doesn't seem fast enough....

This is in NTFS format. Tried FAT32, but there was no improvement. In fact, everything I have tried has led to slower I/O read & write outputs.

One of your drives should hity 52 to 55,000+ on reads and iIn fact ONE drive should also hit 45 to 50,000 if everything was right on the writes. Do you have another drive to put an OS on so you can test both those drives seperatly as single drives? Sometimes one drive or evena bad cable just screws raid-0 all to hell. Everything has to match close for best performance. If ones slow the other has to lag way behind and it keeps waiting and waiting.... I have setup maybe a dozen of the differant promise controllers and you generally half to work harder to get them running just right.

Have you tried moving the card around to differant slots?
tex

skeptic

Tex wrote:

One of your drives should hity 52 to 55,000+ on reads and iIn fact ONE drive should also hit 45 to 50,000 if everything was right on the writes. Do you have another drive to put an OS on so you can test both those drives seperatly as single drives? Sometimes one drive or evena bad cable just screws raid-0 all to hell. Everything has to match close for best performance. If ones slow the other has to lag way behind and it keeps waiting and waiting.... I have setup maybe a dozen of the differant promise controllers and you generally half to work harder to get them running just right.

Have you tried moving the card around to differant slots?
tex

I don't have another drive to install, but my wife's computer (which has 1 WD80GB 8MB drive) sits right next to me. It puts out basically the same score. So, you're correct on that part.

I will try to change the IDE cable out. I haven't tried to move the Promise card yet. This is a newly-built system, and I assumed that all the PCI slots would work fine. But, I'll give it a try also.

As for you "working on Promise controllers to get them running just right", what exactly did you tweak to get them to run better? I've messed with the P.A.M management, installed the latest drivers for everything, messed with the PCI latency, etc., etc., etc.....to no avail.

Here's my specs:

Abit NF-7
AMD Athlon XP 3200+ Barton core
1024MB PC3200 RAM
The promise card
The hard drives
Sapphire RADEON 9800Pro 128MB, 256-bit card
1 DVD-ROM drive
1 CD/RW drive
Soundblaster Audigy

Tex

The reason you move it around is at the board level you get four... and only four hardware IRQ's for the pci bus, the agp card and usually the usb and any onboard raid and stuff. So if the raid card is in a slot that shares with lets say... the AGP or Audigy... they are both bus hogs and steal a lot of bandwidth and screw you over. What is the latency of the card set to now? Whats it set to in the bios and what is your card and the other cards actually runnng at?

I would start by striping it down again and starting from scratch. I have done so many ide raid setups I can't begin to count and I'm very good.... but sometimes you just get soemthing fubar'd in teh filesystem or windows and drivers or the stripe or something and you can strip it down clean and make it work right the next time. Your wifes box got enough room to back up the critical stuff? If so lets get started. Times a wasting my friend. (grin)

Let me know the stuff I asked about but I can walk you through testing each componet and setting it up again right but I would bet we have to start over. Sometimes when your messing around and trying differant patch's and drivers and cluster sizes etc.... things just get whacky and its best to know when to hold them and when to fold them.

Tex

skeptic

PCI latency timer is currently set at 32 clocks. I've had it as low as 8 clocks...with no effect.

Wife's box doesn't have the ability at this time to hold my stuff. I'll have to do it all from scratch or not at all. It's the "usual" for me....starting all over again. lol

Is there a latency for each card? How do I get that info?

I did move the card to another slot....and turned my cables around (just because I haven't messed with them yet...lol) and I improved to a max of 68000 read output, but the write output is still hovering around 42000 MB/s. I wonder why they don't match up...or at least be a little closer on speed.

Tex

Sandra can show it. You set it with Powerstrip. The prob with increasing it in the bios is you give ALL the devices more. And your AGP is probably at 256 right now. I disable all the extra devices... serial and stuff you don't need. If I only had usb printers and not storage devices I would crank usb and printer port down and since I don't game I lowered my video way down also. The porn still looks fine trust me on this one... The bios setting is a default for each device but at times some device drivers on the install try and set it also. I have had gains with two and four drive arrays on promise cards all the way up to 256 and thats maxed. But you still need to pull out you manual and see what devices or pci slots share with each other also as thats a big key to the game. When you rebuild (and do you really mean you can't beg borrow or steal some sorry olf 4gb ide drive to run on just long enough for us to get the raid array working right?) You need to keep it stripped all down with as little as possible. No sound. No fancy video drivers. No nothing at first. We want to eliminate all the variables. Then when we test each drive and know they both work fine stand alone we reboot and make a clean array with proper drivers/bios etc in place. If we get our score without much jacking around you add stuff back in ONE at a time and reboot and test again... Its a pain but you can usually get there. You can tell I have been in more then my share of problem raid tweaking advertures. It gest to be a sicknes... You get it right and you notice a few months later its slowed down.... I have at least four computers at the house on a gigabit lan so backing up my crap isnt the problem.... But Robins box had one of the highpoint raid arrays in it and she finally laid down the house law that I was NOT to take her box down just to tweak the raid anymore..... I could have all the other toys I could scrounge but Tex better back off her box... LMAO.

Tex

skeptic

The promise card is sitting on BUS 1, along with the Audigy card. Both are clocked at 32. No other pci cards are in a slot (except for the RADEON card...in AGP).

Everything else is sitting on Bus 0.

I have Powerstrip...but where do you change the PCI latency on it? I thought it was just for o/c'ing the videocard.

And yes, I really mean I can't find a hard drive around here. I'm the only one (that I know) that messes with computers as much as I do. I do have a 7 year old WD 10GB drive....but I'd rather put my foot in a meat grinder than trust it with anything. LOL

Tex

Look in your manual where it describes how the IRQ's are are assigned.

Looks like PCI slot 1 shares with Slot 5 as well as the SI raid if you have it for example.

Tex

skeptic

PCI slot 1 does share with slot 5, like you said. There isn't onboard RAID on this mobo. I slipped the card into slot 2 & 3 with no positive results. While slipping the card into slot 3, Windows went through it's "finding new device" crap, and I gave it the correct driver. But, stupid me, in my haste to get it rebooted...I went too quick. I shut the computer down before the drivers were fully installed....and....had an error coming up while booting (NTLDR error). Well, it was time to reformat. Before reloading, I created a new array with 16K striping. I'm in the process of loading up the drivers and such. But, I did run ATTO when I got the chipset drivers loaded (with nothing else in). Annnnd, came up with the same results. No increase in speed. Cluster size is at 4KB now.

lemonlime

I would agree that you should be seeing read/writes of close to 100mb/s. I was having a similar problem with a SCSI PCI card. I swapped it into one of the slots on a different BUS, and my speeds went from 20mb/s to 75mb/s on a single drive. It made a huge difference. I never did find out what was bogging down that second PCI bus though.

The cluster size and stripe size will make small improvements on the top and bottom ends, but you should not see huge changes in your atto scores. I have a single WD 80GB drive (8mb cache) at work, and I got consistant scores of around 59,000 on the top end. In a raid configuration you should see anywhere from 90-105 depending on fragmentation and how full the drives are.

Have you tried looking for a promise bios update for the raid card? are you using the latest bios for the NF7?

Good Luck.

lemonlime

Oh, btw, your atto scores seem consistant with the PCI issue I was having before as well. Before moving the card, I got scores (single maxtor atlas 10kIV) of around 25mb/s write and 65mb/s read. After, I got about 71 write and 75 read. It appears that the writes are more greatly impacted with this type of problem.

skeptic

That's what I've been thinking it's been. I have only two actual cards, some USB, and nothing else. I've put the Soundblaster card on the PCI 5 slot and the promise card in slot 3. It's given me the best output so far. But it's still showing the low & high output.

As for flashing the BIOS....I'm using that as a last resort.

Tex...I'll have to download my manual. For the life of me, I can't remember where I put the blasted thing! Here's my IRQ list though:

skeptic

Well, forget the BIOS flashing for the card. It has the latest version on it already.

skeptic

And I just got done flashing the mobo BIOS, along with talking to ABIT. Talk about a waste of time on the phone.

First off, the guy barely spoke english (VERY heavy accent). Caught pieces of what he was saying...but basically he didn't know jack about my problem and probably didn't know what a controller card was. Let alone a RAID array was.

Just irratating.