I recently got 2 new drives, both are seagate barracuda's IV ATA 100, 60GB drives. AS me motherboard has a built in raid controller (high piont 370) went for a RAID array mode 0 for best performance. except nero, and SiSoftware Sandra are reproting the array of having a 13MB transfer rate, where i was expect something like 80 to 100MB rate. how can i improve this?
Hey I was having a quick word to IS the other day about this, as i hope to soon buy a 80gb Barracuda IV. He said that they didnt work well in RAID, can overload the RAID controller and perform worse than a single Barracuda Drive. So id suggest running them sepeartely, on each IDE channel. Ill get IS to have a look at this post! Marz
This sounds about right. Try running the drives out of RAID, and performance should improve. Seagate's reason, when asked about this (it's a well-known issue) is that the drives are too fast for the RAID controller (this is a quote from another website): "Chris, The Barracuda ATA IV has the fastest internal transfer rate of any of its competitors. This is why it is the highest performance drive in its class in certain applications when used by itself. Evidently, when the drive is used in some RAID 0 environments, it can supply data to the interface faster than the host system can request it. Under some circumstances, such as reading sequential data, this can cause the drive to incur a latency. This means when the host request comes too late -- after the data's initial immediate availability -- the drive must wait for the disc to rotate up to one revolution for the requested data to be available again. Under these circumstances, the drive appears to be slow in performance when actually it is too fast. This is not a new phenomenon. Because Seagate is the leader in new technologies and products, and the increased performance they bring, we sometimes have to wait for the rest of the industry to catch up. When Seagate introduced the Cheetah X15, over one million drives ago, there was a similar issue with a few SCSI RAID controllers. Like the SCSI RAID environment, we anticipate optimized controllers will become available. In the meanwhile, it appears some 2-drive ATA RAID 0s can't keep up with the Barracuda ATA IV. There is no alternate slower firmware available to accommodate the problem. Best Regards, Ron Stacy Seagate Product Support" I do not know whether it would help, but a more recent RAID controller, such as the HPT-372 or HPT-374 might solve your problems, although since I'm guessing it's built into your motherboard, this will come as little consolation.
so basically at the moment they are wasted in RAID 0, yes the RAID controller is built in. However I did see on tomshardware how to turn a Promise ultra100tx into a RAID controller by flashing the BIOS and replacing it with the equivilent RAID bios and soldering a resistor in place, as I (luckily)have a spare Ultra100tx in the attic i might give that ago and see if that can keep up, if not the promise ATA133 RAID controller might be worth getting as I think that should keep up. Thanks for your help.
I've got a question If I may: Wheres the best place to get these baracuda drives in the uk?, one of those sounds like just the ticket cheers!
can you hey them from ebuyer as well then? on the raid subject, managed to get a transfer rate of 30MB a sec after changing to FAT32 and updating the drivers, which is sh*t, so i'm going to use the drives indipendenly at 45MB sec transfer rate, which means when i get a fast enought RAID controller should be able to get about 80-90 MB transfer rates, which would be nice.
