Disk access EXTREMELY SLOW - 82801FR Problem?

[Guest]

I have a Dell XPS Gen 3 with a 82801FR Intel controller. I have it set up to
RAID 0 with two SATA drives. Vista Beta 2 installed fine with the latest
drivers off the Intel site, however, performance is SLOW, SLOW, SLOW.

I checked in the performance CPL and it shows the disk performance at 3.1.
It should be much higher, I think. I can tell a big difference, between
local disk operations and network operations. HD light is on CONSTANTLY. I
thought perhaps it was SuperFetch or Index working overtime, but I turned
those off and it still was constantly being accessed. I also checked to see
if any other drivers were slowing things down. It doesn't appear to be the
case, but it is possible.

I don't know what to do, but it really makes Vista hard to use. Are there
beta drivers available for Vista for this controller anywhere? If so, I
can't find them. Does anyone have any other suggestions on how to
troubleshoot?

 

[Guest]

Unplug all your USB Devices. My external hard drive was making things slow
like you. Also, two hard drives on vista is known to be problematic.

 

[Jonathan Schmidt]

Thanks for the reply. The only USB devices I have plugged in is my cordless
mouse & keyboard. Also, I do have 2 hard drives, but they are set up as one
RAID0 device under the BIOS. Vista should only see one hard drive. Does
that matter? Do I need to disable RAID and disconnect one of the drives?

Thanks,

Jonathan Schmidt

 

[JW]

How are your drives connected? If the two drives are on the same IDE bus
then Raid 0 will be slow since an IDE bus can only transfer to or from one
device at a time.

 

[Jonathan Schmidt]

They are both SATA drives on an Intel 82801FR (ICH6R) controller. There are
2 DVD drives on the separate IDE controller. The system performed very
quickly under XP MCE 2005, but under Vista performance is poor. It
literally takes about 5 minutes to boot up under Vista to a point where it
is usable. Once it is running, performance isn't bad unless it needs to
access the drive. File copy performance is slow, as is opening a big app
like Photoshop or Visual Studio 2005. The Performance Control Panel shows
the hard drive as being the slowest (3.1) ... all others are in the high 4.1
to high 5.9 range. I'm just assuming it is a driver problem, but I don't
know.