RAID Performance

[Guest]

I just recently got another hard drive and combined it with my other one and made
RAID(0). I used Norton Systemworks to check its performance and I don't think it's as good as it should be. Both Drives are identical and are ATA100. Norton says the output is about 120Mb/s. I thought it would be almost double the 100 since you use two drives. What is the deal here? Please help me. Here are my specs:
800 Mhz Thunderbird
ABIT KT7-RAID
128 MB RAM
2 x Western Digital 30 Gig ATA100 Hard Drives
Windows ME

 

[Guest]

The RAID controller on the motherboard uses the main CPU inside your computer, as the RAID controller uses system memory as well to emulate RAID. All of these things slow down RAID performance. If you had a true RAID controller such as the Promise SuperTrak100 IDE RAID Controller, the performace would be as expected, since this controller has a processor and 16mb RAM.

 

[Guest]

>>120Mb/s. I thought it would be almost double the 100 since you use two drives. <<

bits or bytes???

Either way it's way off. The total bandwidth may be 200 MB/s but there are few drives that even have STR to push 40+ MB/s. I don't know which ATA100 WDs you have, but even if it's the 7200 RPM models, that's around 60+ MB/s for the two.

If the Norton benchmark is picking up bursts speeds (giving you Mega Bytes) then the benchmark is hard to judge as bursts are really irrelavent. If that's truly Mega Bits it's giving you, I'd try a different benchmark before worrying about it.



***Hey I run Intel... but let's get real***