Awful Nvidia RAID performance - RAID 0 SATA

[lordbane]

I'm getting awful performance according to PCMark05 on SATA Raid with 2 x Maxtor DiamondMAX 10 w/16MB cache drives (250GB x 2 - 64K stripes, 6.66 Nvidia drivers).

 

I'm using SATA1 and SATA2 on the NVidia SATA controller and I am using the NVidia IDE drivers in Windows XP.

 

When I go to using my 200GB Maxtor DiamondMAX PATA drive as my OS boot drive my PCMark05 score doubles (mostly from a vast improvement in the disk test benchmarks).

 

Is there a reason for this? Should I use my PATA drive as my boot drive and use the RAID array as my data drive? Why such awful performance in PCMark05 for a disk setup that should be superior?

 

Can anyone answer this?

[gudodayn]

You said you are using Nvidia IDE drivers?

Why use IDE drivers for SATA drives?

In the Nvidia 6.66 driver, there should be a folder for SATA drives and the drivers are available in normal and raid versions.

What are the exact scores of your tests and which programs did you use to test them?

[lordbane]

Athlon64 X2 3800+ o/c to 2700, SLI-DR motherboard

 

I'm using the NVIDIA SATA drivers and the RAID controller drivers. I removed the NVidia IDE SW drivers as they're not needed.

 

When I run HDTach (96mb/s avg) or ATTO (a little over 100mb/s) or Sandra (92mb/s avg) to test drive performance, it's fairly normal for what you'd expect for SATA-I Raid 0 with 2 disks (maybe a little lowball considering it supports some SATA-II features and has 16mb cache).

 

On the same PC, running off of the PATA drive originally (before I bought the Maxtor drives) I posted a score of 6236 in PCMark05. The rig in my signature below scores about 3777 in the same test.

 

Running off the new array, I am getting PCMark05 scores of about 1800.

 

The reason for the scores is that all the hard drive tests come back with incredibly abyssmal results like 0.005MB/s for HDD - General Usage and 0.030MB/s for HDD - XP Startup in the tests.

 

Has anyone else ever experienced this problem? The same abyssmal benchmarks are seen in PCMark 2002 as well, with HDD tests only coming out at 1535, where my signature rig gets 1952.

[jlissandrello]

I follow the website, www.tweakguides.com, and he just built a machine using the SATA Raid 0 and he wrote,

 

"Update: Despite all the research I had conducted before installing Windows on my new system, it turns out that I selected the wrong size for my RAID stripe. Long story short, it turns out that a 16KB Stripe size is optimal, as opposed the the 64KB size I had chosen. However the stripe size can only be changed by reformatting the entire RAID array, which I eventually did (and the tediousness of reinstall Windows, Apps etc.). The bottom line is my results have noticeably improved..."

 

That's what I set my RAID to and it screams. Give it a try.

[Guest ElAguila]

You shouldn't use the larger stripe sizes unless that drive is going to be used for large files such as databases or video files.

[lordbane]

I rebuilt the array with 16K stripes and it's still doing the same thing in PCMark05. The drive performance report is coming back as worse than a floppy. PCMark04 won't even complete properly. The HDTach scores, etc. barely changed at all.

 

I'm at a loss. Should I move the drives over to SATA 3 and 4 and see what happens? Or even move them to the Silicon Image controller?

 

This is a FRESH install.

 

Windows XP Professional, SP2 with all updates

6.66 NVidia drivers (SMBus and RAID/SATA drivers installed)

6/23 - 03 BIOS

78.03 Forceware drivers

 

I'm at a loss and I'm getting more than a little irritated. WHY is the NVidia RAID implementation acting this way? Why won't it work properly with the PCMark benchmarks? Has anyone else noticed a problem like this? I've seen references to really crappy PCMark scores on other message boards indicating some kind of problem but no one seems to know how to resolve it.

 

Can anyone give me another suggestion as to how I can figure out what's going on?

 

I'm almost ready to just run them both in single channel mode and screw RAID if it's this messed up on this board.

 

PS - Before anyone tries to finger the RAM or overclock or the PSU - The overclock is solid and I ran Prime95 for 24hrs at a higher speed (2750mhz) on the old PATA installation and MEMTEST 1.60 passed for dozens of passes at 5mhz higher mem speed than what I'm running now. Power rails are all stable within norms and temps are cool (X-Navigator case with lots of airflow).

[lordbane]

UPDATE - Well well well

 

 

Seems this is a known issue and Futuremark's software has problems with RAID 0 on both Intel and AMD platforms under certain circumstances where a dual core (or Hyperthreading) exists.

 

http://discuss.futuremark.com/forum/showfl...&Number=5327047

 

http://discuss.futuremark.com/forum/showfl...b=5&o=0&fpart=1

 

http://discuss.futuremark.com/forum/showfl...b=5&o=0&fpart=1

 

I posted a score of 6666 in PCMark05 after updating my AMD CPU drivers in Safe Mode (they don't seem to copy right in normal Windows for some weird reason).

 

Performance is still a little lower than I'd hoped considering that these drives are supposed to scream but I'll deal with it now that this mess is finally fixed.

 

Thanks to those that replied. It kinda sucked to blow everything away to re-stripe the array but overall it did bump up my scores a bit and it feels a little quicker.