Hard Drive Transfer Rate - RAID 0

It would probably help if I start things off with what equipment I'm working with:

P4 2.8C
ASUS P4S800D-E Deluxe
ASUS 9600 XT Video Card
2 x 512 Corsair DDR Chips
2 x 80 Gig 7200 RPM Samsung Serial Drives using RAID 0

After installing a RAID 0 configuration for the first time I didn't see any performance boost (moving from a single 80 Gig 7200 RPM IDE Western Digital HD to 2 x 80 Gig Serial Samsung Hard Drives) until I started messing around a little (and to be honest I really do not know what I did but it seemed to help). After doing a bit of tweaking I was able to get the following results.

PassMark Performance Test 4.0 information.

Read Before = 28.9 Read After = 40.4 MB/sec
Write Before = 29.6 Write After = 59.9 MB/sec
Random Seek+RW B4 = 1.9 After = 3.8 MB/sec

Overall score ended up at 445.9

Two questions:
1) Is this what I should expect and should I leave well enough alone at this point?
2) I ran SiSoftware Sandra as well and it states that my Hard Drive transfer rate does not match the motherboard's and that I should adjust it accourdingly. How would I go about doing that?

Thanks for the help.

 

40% increase in read performance. 102% increase in write performance. 100% increase in random+R/W performance. That seems about right for a RAID 0. Read might be a bit low (did you have anti-virus enabled during testing?).

Things to make RAID 0 perform better:
1. Install the latest chipset drivers and RAID drivers. Often, there's a IDE or RAID utility that lets you configure DMA access on your drives. That might be what Sandra is suggesting. It's difficult to say without seeing the exact message and the context it was in.
2. Put the SATA devices on their own controllers (that is, one is SATA Master 1, the other is SATA Master 2).

 

OK

I shut the virus protection off and you were right my numbers did improve a bit.

Read = 44.7 Mbs
Write = 67.1 Mbs
Random Seek+RW = 4.2 Mbs

I'll have to look for the utility that may help me adjust the DMA setting and the drivers had been updated.

As far as I can tell both drives are on different controllers since one is SATA master 1 and the other SATA master 2.

Thanks for the info.

 

I just looked on ASUS's website. There doesn't seem to be such a utility for SiS chipsets. I thought there was one for Intel chipsets. Maybe I'm on crack. Ah, well.

 

Just a quick update.... if anyone is interested.

I'm in RAID 0 / Serial Heaven right now. I re-installed my 80 gig IDE Hard Drive (for extra storage) which forced me to go into my BIOS to change my boot order and devices (it kept attempting to boot from the IDE over the RAID Serials). I really didn't see a boost in my performance test numbers (PassMark 4.0 is now 450) but I sure can see a difference in boot time. With my single Western Digital 7200 RPM IDE drive the WinXP startup bar went across the screen 10-11 times. At first RAID 0 dropped it to 6-7. After messing with the BIOS a little I got it down to 4-5. It is now down to 2!

I think it's time to leave well enough alone!