Is something wrong with my RAID 0 setup?

dysphunktion

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I think this may be a slightly better place to post this...

::EDIT::
I've been looking around since posting this and maybe these are actually decent scores?
I REALLY have no idea, any thoughts?

Setup:
SB 2500K
Asus P8P67 Deluxe
2 500G Spinpoint F3s
eVGA GTX 470 SC
CM 850 PSU

Ok, so just got all the parts in today and here is what I did:
Built it! (heeh)

Setup the 2 HDs via Sata 2 connectors
Went into the BIOS (LOVE the new BIOS) and set them RAID.
The other options there were IDE, RAID and ACHI.
After that I rebooted and hit CTRL+1 to setup the raid.
I set it to Raid 0, data size (striping?) to 128k and then created it.
Rebooted with Win 7 CD..
Now here is where I think I may have ran into trouble...

I know VERY little about Raid setups but from what I gathered you are supposed to load some drivers for your raid setup.
At this point I did not do that I simply selected the now 9xxGB drive (the two 500s, but listed as the single drive) drive and
installed Windows. After it installed, I installed all the mobo drivers and what not from the CD.
I installed, from cd, the Intel Rapid Storage items and ran it. It told me that my drives were in fact in raid and woot!
I then ran windows experience index and received either a 7.8 or 7.9 in everything BUT disk transfer rate, which was 5.9
I thought that was low so I downloaded and ran Crystal Disk Mark and here is the output after a 1000MB run

Read/Write:

SEQ: 267.5/279.9
512K: 41.51/82.38
4K: 0.470/2.540
4KQD32: 1.822/2.479

From what I have gathered, something is wrong and my HD's aren't running very fast (or is this normal?)

So, I redid the Win 7 64b installation and this time I chose to load drivers
Now, my MB CD came with a Raid drivers folder but the only one that it would accept was for IRST (intels)
The other ones that are on the cd are:
JMB362 and Marvell...

So I chose the Intel one and installed windows again.
Ran windows experience and crystal mark again, same results.

Is this normal? If not, what do you think I am doing wrong? Anything I didn't do, etc?

Thanks so much guys!!
 

lothdk

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I have no experience with Crystal Disk Mark, so can not comment on the data it gives you.

I can however tell you that you will not get any higher than 5.9 with a mechanical disk in the WEI, and really, WEI is NOT a benchmark you can use for anything, it was meant as a rough guideline to post on games, but really never went anywhere.

For your install it seems you have done as needed for the raid to run satisfactory. However, running your one and only storage as raid 0 is not something I would recommend. Only use raid 0 on a drive where you have no problem losing all data when the drive crashes.
 

dysphunktion

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I have a 500g external that I use as a backup, so that is taken care of.
I've looked at PCmark scores, more specifically, Disk Mark scores and it seems
that my scores are quite high. So unless I am mistaken, I think all is well.

I'll leave this open for a bit longer, just to make sure.
Thanks for the HD info on WEI, btw!

::edit::
Are there any W7 tweaks or settings I need to mess with now that I am running a RAID setup?
 

dysphunktion

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Thanks stang, one more thing before I close this thread:

Are there any software settings/tweaks that I can mess with to increase performance, even marginally?