4G4A+ Onboard RAID Performance

[SkuLLy|RT]

My sys setup -

1.6A @ default clock
Epox 4G4A+ w/ 4.24 BIOS
Highpoint 372 Raid BIOS v2.31
2x60GB IBM 60GXP drives
WinXP PRO driver v2.34
512mb GEiL PC3500 Plat

I went ahead and set up a RAID 0 array, using 64k striping size. Installed WinXP PRO. Installation was pretty quick, Sisoft Sandra even posted some blazing results.

There were a few things that I did notice though. 1st, at the initial XP loading screen (the black one with the xp logo and lil blue bar under it), there seemed to be a bit of lag. A faint logo would appear, and then a few seconds later, the logo would finish loading accompanied by hard drive access. The 2nd thing that I noticed, was that in games, there was a lot of hard drive access, which resulted in frames going from 190 to 9 and such. Not a very pleasant gaming experience when anytime something needs to be loaded, the hard drives start accessing themselves and the game slows to a hault.

I wanted to know if anyone had any similar experiences with the onboard RAID device. I realize that onboard RAID is probably the equivalent of using a winmodem, but I did expect better performance from it.

It should also be noted that when I had my cpu clocked to 2.4GHz, performance did not change, still tons and tons of hard drive access, and lots and lots of in game slowdowns.

- SkuLLy

EDIT :: Forgot to mention this earlier. I also attempted to run the drives as normal IDE devices from the onboard RAID headers, with the same results. Delay in loading Windows, lots of access to the hard drive / eating cpu cycles in games. I am currently running my system off of the INTEL IDE headers, and everything works smoothly. Sandra scores are nowhere near what they should be, but games run smooth, and Windows loads without delay.

[SkuLLy|RT]

Went ahead and plugged my drives straight into the RAID headers, but set them up as single drives instead of in a RAID array, and for one reason or another performance was the same.

Boot up lag, constant drive access in games and such.

Hopefully the email I sent to epox tech support will have a helpful answer for me.

[SkuLLy|RT]

done a tiny bit more tinkering around with this stuff, and found some new goods.

ran out to compusa and bought a highpoint rocketraid 404 card, plugged it into my system, and built a raid 0 array out of my two drives again..

it ran pretty damn fast. in fact, it ran smooth on bootup, and even avoided hard disk hits while playing games.

i'm starting to wonder wtf is up with the onboard solution.. :nervous: