Very slow SATA RAID under XP

P

Peter

Just rebuilt my PC with a SATA RAID hard drive array (mirror) using a
Siig SATA-300 controller, and win XP. Last one was win2000, single
SATA drive but used to be a RAID mirror too.

All works fine but there is massive disk activity running certain apps
which write a lot of small files. The activity takes a very long time,
about 10-100x longer than it should, or used to under win2000. In
particular, the exit newsgroup purging which Agent newsreader does is
extremely slow.

Big file reads and writes (say 50MB) are quick.

Has anyone come across this under XP, or with certain SATA
controllers?

I have contacted Siig but they don't support their products.

My experience of these controllers is that they speed up HD ops
massively, whether SCSI or SATA (both of which I have used extensively
under NT4 and win2000).
 
S

Shenan Stanley

Peter said:
Just rebuilt my PC with a SATA RAID hard drive array (mirror) using
a Siig SATA-300 controller, and win XP. Last one was win2000, single
SATA drive but used to be a RAID mirror too.

All works fine but there is massive disk activity running certain
apps which write a lot of small files. The activity takes a very
long time, about 10-100x longer than it should, or used to under
win2000. In particular, the exit newsgroup purging which Agent
newsreader does is extremely slow.

Big file reads and writes (say 50MB) are quick.

Has anyone come across this under XP, or with certain SATA
controllers?

I have contacted Siig but they don't support their products.

My experience of these controllers is that they speed up HD ops
massively, whether SCSI or SATA (both of which I have used
extensively under NT4 and win2000).


Mirror RAID does not improve performance.
 
G

Guest

My experience with SIIG products hasn't been very positive. Try
another brand of SATA controller.

GS
 
P

Peter

(e-mail address removed) wrote
My experience with SIIG products hasn't been very positive. Try
another brand of SATA controller.

I might do, but will the PC still boot?

I have found that the format of a HD which was in a mirror raid array
is not the same as the format of a HD which was used alone. Why this
is, I haven't got a clue since it isn't necessary AFAICS. The PC does
not even boot from a HD which was in an array and is then moved to the
standalone config on the *same* controller. So if I change the
controller to another brand, I might lose all the data...

SIIG just use the Silicon Image SIL3132 Softraid 5 chipset which lots
of firms use. The SIL31xx chipset is all over the various motherboards
from Gigabyte, ASUS, etc. In this case I am using a standalone RAID
controller (2x SATA 300, PCI-Ex bus) and even I bought a spare one, to
avoid this kind of dependency. My motherboard happens to have a SATA
RAID controller already and probably with the same chipset, but I
didn't use it for this reason.

On another machine (critical one, used for accounting) I used an
Adaptec SATA RAID (150) controller and that one works fine, but in
this case I wanted a 300 one and Adaptec don't seem to make those.
 
A

Anteaus

Mirrors take several hours to initialise and during this time they may be
slow. Leave on overnight and see if things have improved.

Other thing, check in Device Manager to see if the disk driver is using DMA.
If not, disk access will be very slow, and will cause 100% CPU load whenever
the disk is accessed.
 
H

HeyBub

Shenan said:
Mirror RAID does not improve performance.

Yes it can. On some controllers. There's obviously no improvement when
writing a file, but when reading, the closest head to the requested track
gets the call.

If one head is on track 10 the other head on track 90 and the requested data
is on track 90, then head 2 will be assigned the read, eliminating the
access time necessary to move head 1.
 

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