XFX REVO64 Speed issues

[fatchan]

Just got a XFX REVO64 5 drives card and installed it using 2 WD 200GB drives and 1 200gb maxtor. Set it up as a RAID 3 that seems to have no problems after reboot excpt for one minor detail: Speed

On the system is an old 200GB IDE drive for backups and it loads the same data 2x as fast.

Speed problem 1:

I have 180GB of data on the 200GB drive and copied this to the RAID.
When I open the 200GB disk it shows me all the folders and files instantly.

Try this with the Raid disk, a 350GB partition, and it can take up to a minute of very noisy disk crunching before anything happens. Sometimes it hangs all the windows involved or recently clicked. (the zonealarm window got stuck among others)

Speed problem 2:

Its just slow, big files, small files its not getting above 8mb/sec. average. With a setup like this I expect to multitask disk operations, but nope: copying files and loading software at the same time is just like working with my old Pentium III 500mhz.

And the noise sounds wrong too, I had stripe sets before and they never sounded this noisy, it sounds like disks on the brink of desintegration after 5 years of no defrag. when in fact all data on them was copied from another disk and not updated or deleted.

The two western digital drives where part of a stripe set I used in another computer and they performed beautifully.

Setup:

Asus A8n SLI premium
XFX 6600GT
3gb ram
2x Western Digital 200GB disks
2x Maxtor 200GB disks (1 SATA 1 IDE)
Windows XP SP 2 clean install on the newly created bootable RAID 3


So anyone any ideas? I have a few but they are all about bringing the card back

For the same money I could have bought 2X 250GB disks and build a RAID 5 with the build in raid controller and probably have 3x the speed I have now.

I hope someone has some suggestions or a solution, if not I guess I will swap the card for 2 disks. The store has a 8 day no question asked return policy

[Nox]

sounds daft, but tried a defrag?

Re RAID cards, I have no experience of that particular one (or any other SATA ones at this time!) but have been looking into them. It seems some RAID cards do suffer from slow writes, I would do a search on google and read some reviews - check to see if this is a common problem - and potentially email XFX/the XFX chap that used to browse here and see if they have a solution (if it is a known prob)

You can also have a chat to the shop, see if they know about this issue, and have any ideas.

My old LSI megaraid 320 actually performed slower than a single drive when I was using it!

Nox

[shaithis]

I may be wrong but I was under the impression that those Revo cards use RAID 3.

RAID 3 has a number of performace issues and is technically inferior to RAID 5 for a number of reasons. Add to that, RIAD 5 can be slower then a single disk for some operations.......

[Nox]

try drivers aswell

For the same money I could have bought 2X 250GB disks and build a RAID 5 with the build in raid controller and probably have 3x the speed I have now.

yep, wouldn't of been limited to the PCI bus xfer rate either.

A lot of raid controllers seem to have ludicrously slow write speeds - have a look on google, something their may help.

Nox

[fatchan]

sounds daft, but tried a defrag?

Not that daft, its the first thing I tried because it sounded like I was using a fraged disk.
But because all data was copied from another disk and never touched there was nothing to defrag. So far I have only wrote to the RAID while copying the files from the IDE drive.

Re RAID cards, I have no experience of that particular one (or any other SATA ones at this time!) but have been looking into them. It seems some RAID cards do suffer from slow writes, I would do a search on google and read some reviews - check to see if this is a common problem - and potentially email XFX/the XFX chap that used to browse here and see if they have a solution (if it is a known prob)

You can also have a chat to the shop, see if they know about this issue, and have any ideas.

My old LSI megaraid 320 actually performed slower than a single drive when I was using it!

Nox

This card must be pretty new, I have found no real info on it anywhere, I did however found this forum when googling for it, the intro by the FXF guy where he promoted this REVO64 card was one of the few things I did find

I know they had some Matrox bios issues with this card but as far as I gathered only on later models and all of the problems where related to loosing settings.

I can buy a new 200GB WD drive to see if its the maxtor, but I really don'twant to spend more money to see if that might be an issue.

Its a pity because at least half of what they promise (hey promise build very nice IDE raid cards, I use to own one, was very fast ) it does install just like that and windows picks it up like any ordinary IDE controller, but it also makes you feel like your using any old IDE controller ... remember the days when 33mhz was a revolution?

Its cool that you get a cpu load of 0.06% on big disk operations, then again at the spead its reading and writing my SATA controller would probly have the same 0.06% reading

Its weird to see your system freezing, drives going crazy just because you drag selected a bunch of folders.

I may be wrong but I was under the impression that those Revo cards use RAID 3.

True its RAID 3 with a max of 5 disks on this controller.

try drivers aswell

Well that is another problem, no idea where to start. It is suppose to be a driver-less product and I can't find any drivers on the net for this specific product.

only a bios update released may 2005 (huh? how come I have an older version I bought it last week?.... not a very popular product I guess.)

I will see if anything pops up tomorrow otherwise its going back and i'll take 2 250GB disks instead thank you very much

[Xaar]

hmm..

i've read a hexus review of these, which sounded very promising.. also the offer from scan made it extremely temptin offer (try before you buy to ensure your happy with it's perfoirmance)

Hope you get this issue resolved, and please post your findings here, as I was seriously considering buying some myself (till I read this)

[Nox]

The promise card (8350) has also had write speed issues from two sources I know on other forums, one took his back, the other said it started working for absolutely no reason, and hes happy with it as long as it stays 'as is' but would have no idea what to do if it went wrong again. I was suprised to read the XFX this is a hardware raid controller too!

If it is using standard IDE (or similar drivers) to access it under windows, it may well be worth looking at updating chipset drivers too. Have you any other machines you can plug this card into?

Nox

[fatchan]

i've read a hexus review of these, which sounded very promising.. also the offer from scan made it extremely temptin offer (try before you buy to ensure your happy with it's perfoirmance)

Hope you get this issue resolved, and please post your findings here, as I was seriously considering buying some myself (till I read this)

If you have 3 disks to spare I still think its something worth trying, but my guess is the disks have to be of pretty recent make and should not be Maxtor disks. I just registered with XFX support and this iswhat I found in the raid controller section:

Requirements
# 1.5Mbytes free disk space
# SATA ATA 150 compatible hard drives
# Minimum PSU 450W
# Windows XP SP 1a or later, Windows 2000 SP3 or later

3 identical Hitachi drives seem to be the trick, if you can afford the card + drives you will get a very nice setup.

[Nox]

not maxtor drives?? lol, sorry shouldn't chuckle. oh dear!

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.ph...6&redirect=yes

I was thinking of you just chucking it into the second PC so you could boot it from its original OS disk, and bench the raid arrays (as D: and E - would of potentially shown a OS prob, but looks like you've hit the nail on the head anyway

Nox

[fatchan]

Well turns out your thinking was pretty good, "chucked" it into my old Pc and guess what? Its still not as blisteringly fast as I hoped but selecting multiple folders is now almost (almost is still pretty bad for a RAID i think but what can you do..) as fast as on my old IDE drive.

Keeping in mind I now have 2 identical drive setups on two computers where the default SATA or IDE drives have always been faster in simple OS tasks.

One thing I can conclude from this is: use this card as a storage option, not as a boot disk.

Not sure why it has so much trouble reading the table of content on the disks, I can't imagine it rebuilding all folder TOC's everytime you aces it but it definately looks like it.

Using Directory Opus (long live amiga software ported to windows) to check for folder size it is pretty fast and most of all: It is what it should be: speed remains the same no matter what

After reading the Hexu review (thanks for the link) I got HD Tach and ran some tests on both systems. On the "other" Pc the one that does not boot from the RAID it has a very steady R/W of 100MB sec

Netcell support advised me to update the Bios and so I did: a harddrive dropped and its rebuilding the RAId as I type. Why the drive failed and came I don't know, but it sounds a bit like the maxtor issues I read about. Shame it was th WEstern Digital disk that was dead and came back to live. (zombie disk?)

Even with the BIOS update its still pretty horrible booting XP but that might be because its rebuilding the RAID.

Anyway, will keep you up to date if anything gets solved.

[Nox]

Directory Opus! OMG! blast from the past

Damn, next thing I know i'll be looking for Workbench themes and guru meditations...

Nox

[fatchan]

Guru meditations OMG indeed...
Actually Directory Opus is still one of my favorite and most usefull tools, I use it for FTP and almost all file / explorer type actions. If your looking for a nice file tool you should check it out, they just release the 8.2 version:

http://www.gpsoft.com.au/

[Nox]

Had a bit of a play - thats a pretty quick browser! Shows how slow explorer is.

Nox

[fatchan]

It is fast, you can make it do all sorts of funny stuff.
I actually use it as my FTP client after I got fed up with WS FTP, I guess after using DOPUS everything else feels limiting

[fatchan]

Hi,

I'm happy to say I solved the REVO64 problems and all looks well, it was not cheap: bought 3x250GB Hitachi SATA II drives. Getting a decent 90mb/sec read and 17.1ms access with HD Tach on a Asus A8N SLI mobo.