CarZin 0 Report post Posted October 22, 2003 As I have posted in a few other threads, I have a Gigabyte 8KNXP-Ultra. It has on onboard adaptec HostRAID controller. I have a 3 disk 64 stripe RAID 0 setup (Maxtor Atlas IV 10k 36g). I had performance issues where I didnt think I was getting the speeds (read) I should get. It would appear that depending on the boot, and depending on the time at which I run various benchmarks, I am getting VERY differing results. Pic 1: [image]http://www.thewolfweb.com/photos/00175926.jpg[/image] Now, in this pic, I am getting bad performance (according to HD Tach. It is howing a seek time of 7.5 ms, with not very good disk read. Pic2: [image]http://www.thewolfweb.com/photos/00175925.jpg[/image] I rebooted the machine, and waited many hours to test. I am getting 3.5 ms access time which much better read speeds Hypothesis: I am not giving drives time to spin up upon reboot to get fast seek times and transfer speeds. Caveat: On some reboots, I get fast performance right away with low seeks and fast reads. I am seeing this across ALL O/S's, and with multiple benchmarks. If I use Disk32, then during the 'fast' sessions, I am transfering at about 180 megabytes/sec, and during the slow, I am transferring at about 90 megabytrs/sec. What the heck is going on? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
CarZin 0 Report post Posted October 22, 2003 crap. Where is the edit button... Here is the FAST pic (Pic 1) SLOW pic (Pic 2) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
CarZin 0 Report post Posted October 22, 2003 DAMN. I could really use an edit right now. The pics are flipped above. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Primate 0 Report post Posted October 22, 2003 You could always try preview post before you add reply and then you could make your edits there. As to your other problem, sorry I can't think of anything off the top of my head. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
CarZin 0 Report post Posted October 22, 2003 HECK YEAH!!!!! I figured out my problem, and I think a LOT of people could be having this issue. I remember that disk performance counters can cause problems. I believe that starting with Windows 2000 and going through XP and 2003, they are set to either ON or DYNAMIC by default. Well, I was running HD Tach seeing the same crappy numbers. I went to the command prompt, entered 'diskperf -n' and BOOM, things shot through the roof! I am so happy. Who would have thought this could affect performance in such a dramatic way? I have now restarted the machne numerous times and am getting stellar results. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
mckennma 0 Report post Posted October 22, 2003 Do you have the latest BIOS for MB and firmware for the host controller? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
CarZin 0 Report post Posted October 22, 2003 Yes. The adaptec controller is built into the motherboard, so the updates would have to come from my motherboard company. I have the latest greatest revision of this board (Rev 2) that is under 2 months out, with the only BIOS available for it. I hope the guy who had another GKXNP-Ultra also tries this. I sent him a PM. I have verified my results across 2 different operating systems now. Everything is lovely Here is my SiSoft Sandra results: Not bad Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
mckennma 0 Report post Posted October 22, 2003 155,000 is good for 3 Raid 0 drives. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
CarZin 0 Report post Posted October 22, 2003 So we are on the same page, Yes, I agree. I am very very happy with that. HOWEVER, before I stumbled upon cutting off disk counters, the drives were getting HALF that rate, and DOUBLE the seek time. I am going to detail everything and send it to the motherboard company. As much as I have spent on this issue, it feels great to have solved it finally. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
DogEared 0 Report post Posted October 22, 2003 Since we cannot truly disable performance counters ( according to anything I've read on the subject anyway) what applications can re-enable the counters? Just PerfMon? WMI type programs? It seems HD benchmarking software doesn't do it... or does it? It's hard to believe disk counters cause a 50% hit in performance. And yes I did see the pictures. I've just never seen that kinda hit from disk counters. Maybe when Microsoft said "3-5% performance hit" they meant "30-50% performance hit." HA hahahahah DogEared Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
CarZin 0 Report post Posted October 22, 2003 Well, it might have to do something with the fact that I am using HostRAID which is a software aided RAID solution. I believe it uses CPU cycles instead of an onboard chip. Maybe its possible that disk counters while doing heavy transferring it interfering with quick processing of the RAID calculations. Thats my best guess, anyway. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ericg 0 Report post Posted October 22, 2003 You could do RAID 0 with Win2k alone. I suspect performance would be identical. You should report the performance counter glitch to Adaptec. The drivers are layered like this: SCSI port driver (adaptec), disk class (disk.sys), disk performance filter (diskperf.sys). Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
