Need help with a Raid 0 set up

Ok i have a Silicon Image Sil 0680 Ultra-133 Medley ATA raid Controller card with two 40 GB Maxtor ATA 133 hard drives In a RAID 0 config
but i am not getting any performance from them same as if i had one HDD
i am using Windows XP pro please help me thanks

[Omega]

In regular use, you're not really going to notice much difference between a regular hard drive and a RAID 0 array. Try running SiSoft Sandra disk benchmark and see how your real performance stacks up. My guess is that you actually are getting somewhat improved performance, it's just not really noticable in your situation.

Well Thats how i found out i used sandra and there is no real + to my raid 0 is there anything you can think of i am a computer tech buy trade but new to raid stuff

You should be getting a drastic increase in data transfer with the raid array. Sandra states the average data transfer as ??. The normal one hard drive in really good condition is 24,000 max. Raid array in really good setup should be in the mid 30,000 transfer. IE::like 35,000-36,000.
What is your packet size, I may be wrong in the terminology, on this. I believe 16 is probably the best size to be running for performance. Do you have both hard drives set up as master and slave on the same IDE cable?

[Omega]

Ah, good question (the last one), about them being on the same IDE channel. Additionally, if they are on separate channels, are they the only device on the channel?

You said 16k was a good packet size. If you want higher performance, go with a higher size, but also lose more space due to excess slack (ex: a 1 kB file would take up 16 kB, from what I understand).

If you are using two cables and attached to two raid sockets. The drives are mirrowed and not running as one 80gb hard drive. You want the drives attached to one cable, attached to one raid connector. One (the one on the end of the cable should be set as master, the on connected to the center hd attachment, should be set as the slave. With this setup, you should get the whole 80gb as one drive and thransfer speed should be about 34,000 kbps per sec.

[Omega]

Uh, I'm quite confident that's not right...at least with all RAID controllers (and I wouldn't see why you'd even want to do that). I'm running a RAID 0 array with two drives, one primary master and one secondary master. If they were running on primary as master and slave, you'd have performances losses. You can run RAID 1 or RAID 0 on different IDE channels.

[vee_ess]

Did you re-install your OS every time you switched?

I am having this same problem.

I set it to 64k banks, raid0, on two maxtor 40gig 7200 rpm drives.

both on the same cable, primary raid channel on a brand new KX7-333r motherboard.

Freshly installed WinXP.

Installed NVid 40.84 drivers, Via 4-in-1's v440.

ran pc mark, HDD score is WORSE than when i was running only 1 40gig maxtor.

Ran Sandra- scores around 16,000. whats the deal? wtf are we doing wrong?

You might try setting the drives as master and attach them to different ports on two cables. Ide3 primary and Ide4 primary then set up the raid 0 and see if this helps in the data transfer. You will still show a 80gb drive this way and should get the maximum transfer of data.