Hey, I just ran HDTach, and noticed that the average read speed on my RAID-0 array is really low, lower than my standalone drive and comparable to my RAID-1 array. Here were the results: RAID0 - Average Read Speed - 84.2 MB/s Burst Speed - 340.4 MB/s RAID1 - Average Read Speed - 71.4 MB/s Burst Speed - 198.1 MB/s Standalone - Average Read Speed - 91.4 MB/s Burst Speed - 244.9 MB/s The two raid arrays are both on a pair of seagate barracuda 320GB's, and the standalone disk is a 1TB barracuda. I'm running Vista32 and the drives are on an ICH7R controller. Vista doesn't seem to allow me to enable Write Caching on any of my drives, even the standalone drive. Whenever I check the box, it's unchecked the next time I open the window. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Mobo: ASUS P5W DH Dlx 1901 CPU: C2D E6600 @ 3.4GHz
ICH7 is quite old, and software RAID never gives awesome results. Additionally, the 320 drives are far slower than the newer 1TB drive. That said I would still expect at least 90MB/s from the pair.
The thing is, when I was running XP Pro on the exact same machine, HDTach showed scores in the 140 range for the RAID-0 array. XP allowed me to turn on write caching, which Vista doesn't seem to want to let me do.
Hmm, not sure what the vista drivers are like for software RAID. That may be the cause of your problem. Did they install automatically or did you download them from your motherboard manufacturer's website?
I'm not sure what you mean by software raid in this case... the actual raid controller is hardware... I don't have any additional raid software installed. The ICH7R drivers were installed automatically during the Vista installation. There's no Intel Matrix Storage Manager or anything like that installed... maybe that's what allowed me to force write caching in XP?
Nope, the motherboard's RAID controller does nothing but pass the info to the CPU unless you have a very expensive several hundred dollar RAID card.
