PCTech Forums

Well I just bought two new harddrives and a raid card so I could get better performance, the opposite has happened

Not sure what's going on, but the speed of two striped (Raid 0) drives is slower than my single IBM Deskstar drive.

The card I bought was....

http://www.ivmm.com/eio/products_dm8401r.html

The two drives I bought were...

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=42

Eh hmm, I did a sandra benchmark test and the results were kinda poor, they indicated the two drives operating as one had a measly 39mb/sec output.

The drives are 80gb each, i've partitioned them into 2 drives, D being the large partition, C being the smaller one

Here's a screenshot from sandra.

I don't see what you are trying to accomplish.

Two raid drives should be same same, no partitions. both should be the same size.
should work real clean.

Try using hdtach instead of sandra - this will benchmark across the entire drive and give you a much better idea of the performance.

Darn
I was going to tell you to try a 32kb or 16kb stripe size.
You should be getting better speeds than that.

System specs needed:
What make and model motherboard is in this system?
What CPU are you running?
How much RAM do you have installed?
And maybe what is your PCI bus speed?

What make and model motherboard is in this system? ECS L7VTA PCB 1.0x
What CPU are you running? Athlon 2000XP
How much RAM do you have installed? 512MB, DDR400Mhz
And maybe what is your PCI bus speed? Not sure.....? how could I check?

Assuming it's not a driver issue - do you have the latest drivers for both your motherboard & the RAID card? Then the only thing I can think is that there is a bottleneck in the PCI bus. The stats from your deskstar show a 90MB/sec burst rate, yet the raid shows only 64MB/sec. The PCI bus has a theoreticaly limit of 132MB/sec, so you should be seeing higher speeds than that. What other PCI cards & devices do you have?