Challenged by a hardware upgrade today

[juneau]

/snip

Ouch! Are the Seagates set as Sata1 or 2? They have a little jumper on the back iirc.

[WalkinTarget]

Yanno, I never bothered to even look, as I pulled them fresh out of the box and plopped them into whatever rig needed a drive at the time.

I will check on this as well when I have the rig apart. I was going to replace the PSU, as it was borrowed from another rig and I plan on ordering one within a week. Could be something as simple as one jumpered to SATA 1.5 and another to SATA 3.0 !

[Trooper110]

Hopefully that's the problem WT...easy fix....and we all know the HD manufacturers are dirty bums

[juneau]

Yanno, I never bothered to even look, as I pulled them fresh out of the box and plopped them into whatever rig needed a drive at the time.

I will check on this as well when I have the rig apart. I was going to replace the PSU, as it was borrowed from another rig and I plan on ordering one within a week. Could be something as simple as one jumpered to SATA 1.5 and another to SATA 3.0 !

I hope that's it because those 320GB Seagates are single platters iirc. Like samsung and WD's offering and they're extremely nippy.

[Donziboy2]

Do you have virtual memory disabled on the drives or are they not your os drive? Maybe something is using the hd while your testing like a antivirus.

This is my first test on hdtest and i was using my comp while it was running hence the big dips plus its 75% full atm.
Its a 74g sata 1 raptor.



Half full 500gb wd sata 2.

[WalkinTarget]

Yikes !! Donzi, your drives look like mine .. blechhh. And those are Raptors ?? You got me beat in access time, but those huge dips into the under 10's are exactly what I'm seeing.

These are the older 2 platter Seagates .. I picked them up from Best Buy for $60 a piece last December. They are my OS drives, so like I said, Superfetch is doing its Vista thing for a bit until that settles down.

[Donziboy2]

The dips in the raptor are from me using the computer at the time of the bench. The raptor is my os drive so whenever i opened a new window it dipped. Second drive is just a normal 7200rpm WD.

[Dead...Again]

UM, WT I don't think you get a performance increase in a mirrored array. You should have done a striped array.

[WalkinTarget]

Do tell ?? Dead, I read the manual after hitting this snag in the initial setup of the BIOS, which defaulted to striped.

When I looked at the options to stripe, it showed my array as being 640gb, which meant it was NOT running in what I felt was the proper performance RAID 0 option.

Here's the good news: I can break the array, set it to striped and then restore the image from my WHS box.

Yet another consideration: These are the Seagate 320 drives that had the infamous AAK firmware that degraded performance. When Juneau and I discussed this back then, HD Tune identified the drives as having a '3.AA' firmware on them, but rumor has it that they were just not identified properly by the older version of HD Tune, and they may in fact have the AAK firmware !
Good news is there is a beta .AAM firmware (only for 320gb drives ending in serial -30 so I have that to flash and test as well.

Edit: Here's what appears to be my issue:

In mirrored RAID, the files are written twice, once to each hard drive. That's good for users who want a constant backup of their hard drive.

In striped RAID, the files are split and placed half on each drive. It speeds up file access.

As Dead mentioned, looks like I have mine set as mirrored. DoH ! Not sure why it was reporting a striped 640gb striped array when I first set it up.

[WalkinTarget]

OK, work completed. I broke the RAID array (wasn't hard, ... messing with the cables had pulled a power lead loose, so I hadda plug that back in just to get the second drive spinning) and rebuilt it as a striped array, optimal size and then booted to the WHS recovery CD.
That initially didn't find a drive, so it sends you over to the advanced drive options tab, where it opens up Windows Comp Management tool, allowing you to choose the now visible drives and format and make them basic drives.
After 45 minutes, the recovery had finished and I booted back up into Vista with a now MUCH faster drive array:





Many thanks to Dead for identifying what my problem was. It was an easy fix due to the full backup from WHS, so my drives are now operating at what I expected them to all along.

[juneau]

You know, you setting up a mirror array instead of a striped array never entered my mind. Guess i must be losing it in my old age.

[Trooper110]

Don't feel bad juneau, I didn't think of it either. Well, I assumed WT knew what he wanted and what he was doing, so......

[WalkinTarget]

OK, I don't mind being the dufus on this one. It really was one of those forehead slap moments (Wow, I coulda had a V8 striped array !!) and I was even reading the manual on the darned thing !!!

Only my third RAID array built in 18+ years of toying with PCs, so rest assured the mistake won't happen again.

Next project: shoehorning 6 300gb IDE drives into a case just because. I wonder what RAID array that will demand ? RAID 10 ?

[K PhaNTOM]

I think I won, I think I won. I ran the HD tune thingi and got some numbers... who beat me? And can anyone tell me what are those dots?

[Dead...Again]

I'm glad I could be of help WT. I just happened to notice when I ran HD Tune on my system that it said NVIDIA STRIPE, so when i saw your screenshot, it stood out.

I'm also glad that you were able to do a recover and didn't have to do a complete install again. This was my first RAID array, and I think I had to reinstall a few times before I had everything right.