Issue with transfer rates between HDD's on 680i

L31mr0d

My current system setup is in my sig. My OS is Vista Ultimate x64. I recently installed 2x1TB Hitachi SATAII HDD's.

Initially I wanted to set both of them up in a RAID 1. So I set enabled these drives for a RAID in the BIOS, then pressed F10 at POST to assign both of them to a Mirrored RAID.

I then booted into Vista and went to computer management to format them. I chose GPT and then formatted them as NTFS. It took close to 48 hours to completely format the RAID 1.

Upon finishing I tried to copy across some files and found the transfer rate was only maxing out at 6MB/s :shrug: This is slower than when sending files to my USB stick.

Thinking it was my RAID that was the problem I disabled the RAID and formatted one of the disks again (this took around 24 hours to complete, I didn't use quick format) I then tried to copy over some files and the transfer rate is now maxing out at 15MB/s , which is still way too slow.

From reading around i've read it could be a problem with the nVidia nforce drivers? Does anyone here have any information about this? Could it be an issue with Vista? Or the RAID controller?

My system is also overclocked, could that be affecting the transfer rate of the drives in any way?

Here are some HD Tach readouts:

2 x 1TB RAID 1



Primary OS partition

RoyalMarine

not sure if it helps, but ive an asus striker 680i and when transferring files from 1 500gb drive to another 500gb drive it maxes out at 57.5 mb/s

not using raid.

10-10-20

L31mr0d wrote: »

My current system setup is in my sig. My OS is Vista Ultimate x64. I recently installed 2x1TB Hitachi SATAII HDD's.

Initially I wanted to set both of them up in a RAID 1. So I set enabled these drives for a RAID in the BIOS, then pressed F10 at POST to assign both of them to a Mirrored RAID.

I then booted into Vista and went to computer management to format them. I chose GPT and then formatted them as NTFS. It took close to 48 hours to completely format the RAID 1.

Use quick format. Only use a full format if you are concerned about bad blocks etc. The quick format just overwrites the headers on the disk. The data in the background will get overwritten with time.

Upon finishing I tried to copy across some files and found the transfer rate was only maxing out at 6MB/s :shrug: This is slower than when sending files to my USB stick.

Thinking it was my RAID that was the problem I disabled the RAID and formatted one of the disks again (this took around 24 hours to complete, I didn't use quick format) I then tried to copy over some files and the transfer rate is now maxing out at 15MB/s , which is still way too slow.

From reading around i've read it could be a problem with the nVidia nforce drivers? Does anyone here have any information about this? Could it be an issue with Vista? Or the RAID controller?

It's likely to be 101 things but some which spring to mind are the cache on the drives, is this enabled?
Also, check the driver version of the controller.
Test by removing one of the disks (fail it in the controller BIOS) and see if the other is as slow.
Check the chipset driver for the MB. A Windows default driver will not have the ideal manufacturer parameters for performance.

My system is also overclocked, could that be affecting the transfer rate of the drives in any way?

Unlikely. The PCI bus timing is independent of the CPU timing, so if you had timing issues you would also see it with other devices in the system and get hangs etc.

Here are some HD Tach readouts:

2 x 1TB RAID 1



Primary OS partition

Questions: What method did you use to transfer data?
Where was the data going? (from & to the same physical disk)
What type of data was it? (large files...?)

The slope you see in HD Tune is quite normal and suggests to me that the drives are capable of performing at up to 90MB/sec when conducting sequential IO. If the IO is random, this takes a massive hit.
I have 15 drive arrays here which give me 200MB/sec writes with sequential IO and large blocks, but only 20MB/sec when using random IO and small (64k) blocks.

L31mr0d

10-10-20 wrote: »

Questions: What method did you use to transfer data?
Where was the data going? (from & to the same physical disk)
What type of data was it? (large files...?)

I just grabbed my "Music" folder, about 80GB in size, and tried to copy it over to the 1TB drive. I also tried copying over single 4GB ISO's, but the transfer rates where the same

The data was going to the 1TB disk from my main OS drive. I also tried copying between the 2 1TB drives but the speeds where roughly the same.

The data was mp3's and ISO's

10-10-20

Hmmm... not knowing the architecture of the controller here is a problem, but I wonder if you maxed the bandwidth of the controller out... Correct me if I'm wrong but the connection between disks was as follows...

Controller (SATA)
|
|

---

Drive 0 (OS disk)
|
|

---

Drive 1 (Mirror 0) (1TB)
|
|

---

Drive 2 (Mirror 1) (1TB)

If you were moving data from Drive 0 into the mirror, you would have created IO from three disks. Now, I'm not saying that this is the issue, but it could be part of it.
Test the config with the mirror broken and see what you get.
The HD Tune results above corroborate this theory as it's achieving high IO rates when only writing to the mirror and not having to deal with the additional overhead of the third disk...

L31mr0d

On the SATA controller are 5 devices, they look as follows:

Controller (SATA)
|
|

---

SATA 0 (320GB WD SATAII) \
|..............................................-- OS Disk (RAID 0)
|

---

SATA 1 (320GB WD SATAII) /
|
|

---

SATA 3 (Empty)
|
|

---

SATA 4 (Sony DVD-RW)
|
|

---

SATA 5 (1TB Hitachi SATAII)
|
|

---

SATA 6 (1TB Hitachi SATAII)

I currently don't have the 1TB drives in any RAID and i'm still getting the low transfer rates.

conzy

Already having a Raid0 setup on it could be killing performance, I dunno...

Whats CPU usage like while copying the files?

L31mr0d

I think i'm going to ghost my OS over to one of my 1TB drives then reinstall Vista. Also there is a new BIOS update for my board so I might try that also.

I tried changing the formatting of one of the drives from GPT over to MBR but it made no difference.

Plus, looking at my HD Tach for my RAID0 it has to be wrong, I should be getting at least a Maximum transfer rate of around 200MB/s

Stephen

Have you tried SP1 for vista? I found disk transfer rates (no raid here either) to improve massively after SP1. I'm on x64 as well.