Raid write speed problem

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I bought a system to make a video editing system consisting of:

Asus a7n 266e MB Rev 1.3
512mb x 2 kingmax DDR RAM
AMD 1800+ XP
3 Maxtor 40 Gig hard Drives D740X 6L040J2
ThermalTake Volcano 7 cpu fan
case w/4 case fans 350W amd ps
HP dvd 100i
sony cdrom
3.5 floppy
Iwill Side Raid 100
Pinnacle DV500+ video editing card
Windows XP PRO

I assembled all the MB in the case, with 1 maxtor connected to the MB secondary master, and the hp dvd 100i on Primary master and sony cdrom on Primary slave. I booted up, and installed XP without a single hang or error. I then installed a 56k modem and updated and activated windows.
I downloaded the latest revisions of bios for the MB (1001.b) and found new drivers for all the hardware. Meanwhile, I set the video to 1024.x768 16 bit 85hz and changed the windows theme to performance and turned of some unnecessary services. Used tips and tweaks from video guys http://www.videoguys.com/WinXP.html
I installed the rest of the hardware Iwill Raid slot4 pci, Pinnacle dv500 slot 3 pci and rebooted windows. Still no hangs or problems. And the system seemed blazing fast. Got premiere 6.01 installed and the dv500 plus software. I Configured the Raid to Raid 0 with 64k stripe and formatted the 2 drives (each on master of each raid channel) with ntfs 64k block size.

Now the problems started.

I could not capture video to the raid system without dropping 1/3 of the frames. I used the Dvexpert utility that came with DV500+ to test the raid system. I was getting 2.84 MB/s write speed average for a 100MB test file. The read speed was about 80 mB/s . I tested the c: drive connected to the onboard controller, and got about 20 mB/s write speed and 35mb/s read speed.
Consequently, I updated the Iwill controller drivers and software from the Highpoint website to ver. 2.31 and still no difference. I tweaked the memory timing to 2.0 turbo and back to default. I disabled the onboard LAN, Sound, and USB hub also moved the cards to different slots with still no difference. In all of this I had to call and reactivate windows. I downloaded Powermax from the maxtor website and checked all the drives. Powermax gave a good report on the drives, and I checked to make sure write verify was off. I moved the DDR ram to different Banks to no avail

At this point, I just tried to capture a video to the C:drive... 740 x 480 ntsc 29.97 fps and 30 minutes later I had not dropped a single frame. I stopped the capture, and tried to play back to the DV500+, guess what: 1/3 of the frames dropped when trying to play back to the dv500.

Sensing some type of conflict, I removed the DV500 and retested the Raid. Still 2.84 mb/s. I went into bios and started tweaking the frequencies down from 133/266 but the write speed stayed around 2.84mb/s however the onboard ide and Raid read speed would slow down. The onboard IDE functioned just fine.

At this point, I ripped out the modem and still about 2.84 mb/s.

Ok, I get on the phone with Asus tech support and the technician tells me I should not be trying to edit with a AMD based system. He says they only meant for it to be a gaming system and that 2.84mb/s doesn't seem to be out of line for the PCI bus. He tells me to check for windows drivers and that as far as he is concerned it can't be a MB problem.

I call Mwave where I ordered the MB and they asked me to reinstall windows, and gave some more suggestions such as checking cables, voltages etc. I Reinstalled windows (with yet again sitting on the phone with MS waiting for a 46 digit activation code) and checked everything. Still all I had was approx 2.84 mb/s write speed to the Raid 0 array of 2 40 gig D740X drives.

Mwave gave me an RMA for the Asus and shipped me a K7N 420 Pro MSI.

I installed the msi with the hp dvd 100i to the onboard IDE primary master and sony cdrom to onboard primary slave. A maxtor D740X was installed on the Secondary master with no secondary slave. I installed the Iwill Raid in pci slot 4 with each D740X on its own channel master.

When I booted from the WIN XP cd and hit F6 to install raid drivers, I installed the updated v2.31 and got a crash for invalid scsi drivers. I merely rebooted and let the install run with the win XP drivers. WinXP installed and came up. I configured the display to 1024x768 16bit and 85hz and installed the updated Iwill Raid drivers. Shut down and Windows hangs on restart at the starting windows screen. Reset and boot to last known good configuration. Try to install the raid configuration software, and it goes fine but when I try to configure I get Configuration failed message. Shutdown restart and hit (control H) and there is the configuration just fine. Try to continue booting, but hangs on starting windows screen. Reset, do (control H) delete the raid, start windows to last known good. Enter disk management initialize the raid drives individually with ntfs quick format 64k block. Shut down restart (control h) add raid 64 k stripe and it boots up.

I shut down and install modem. Fired up and changed the bios to 133/266/66 timing and it boots. I downloaded the latest bios for msi (6.00 pg) and got the latest drivers from nvidia site. I installed the drivers and shutdown and loaded the new bios. The Beast booted. I install the 2.31 driver for the raid card and shutdown restart. It hangs on starting windows. Shutdown restart last known good. It boots. I put in cd with Dvexpert on it and test raid – about 3 mb/s write speed and 30 mb/s read... I test the onboard IDE c: drive and get about 20 mb/s write and 35mb/s read.

I decide to play with the MB frequency and with 100/200/66 CPU/MEM/AGP timing I get about 15 mb/s write speed to the raid with a 35 mb/s read speed. I decide to go get another raid card and try that.

I get a 1200A adaptec from CompUSA and install it.... exactly the same results.

Both the Iwill and 1200A adaptec have Highpoint 370A chips. Both motherboards that I have tried have Nvidia chipsets. I have not been able to install another OS yet, to try that, but I am going to buy another motherboard today with probably a via chipset and try that. I thought maybe the Dvexpert test software was the problem, so I did a drag and drop test from the C: drive to the Raid and it took roughly 30 seconds to transfer an 85mb folder.

It seems to me that there is a major problem with either WIN XP pro/ Highpoint raid drivers/ Nvidia chipset drivers/ Nvidia chipset design/ or bios. I don't think 99.99% of the people using these systems will ever notice because you have to need to send over about 2.5 mb/s out over the pci bus to your peripherals to ever notice. Performance from the peripherals into the system over the PCI bus is blazing especially with the ASUS. But I never edited the registry and tuned the system for performance with the MSI. I never had the 1st hang or error with the asus board, I am just frustrated with the Raid Write Issue.

Any Help is appreciated.

Win XP activation is HELL to go through with a system problem.

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Assuming you are using NTFS try this:



The NTFS file system is the recommended file system because of its advantages in terms of reliability and security and because it is required for large drive sizes. However, these advantages come with some overhead. You can modify some functionality to improve NTFS performance as follows:

1. Disable creation of short names. By default, NTFS generates the style of file name that consists of eight characters, followed by a period and a three-character extension for compatibility with MS-DOS and Microsoft® Windows® 3.x clients. If you are not supporting these types of clients, you can turn off this setting by changing the default value of the NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation registry entry (in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Filesystem) to 1.

2. Disable last access update. By default NTFS updates the date and time stamp of the last access on directories whenever it traverses the directory. For a large NTFS volume, this update process can slow performance. To disable automatic updating, change the value of the NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate registry entry (in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentContolSet\Control\Filesystem) to 1. If the entry is not already present in the registry, add it before setting the value. (Add it as a REG_DWORD)

3. Reserve appropriate space for the master file table. Add the NtfsMftZoneReservation entry to the registry as a REG_DWORD in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem. When you add this entry to the registry, the system reserves space on the volume for the master file table. Reserving space in this manner allows the master file table to grow optimally. If your NTFS volumes generally contain relatively few files that are typically large, set value of this registry entry to 1 (the default). Typically you can use a value of 2 or 3 for moderate numbers of files, and 4 (the maximum) if your volumes tend to contain a relatively large number of files. However, be sure to test any settings greater than 2 because these higher values cause the system to reserve a much larger portion of the disk for the master file table.

Reboot after making changes.
Turn off Indexing to speed up XP

Windows XP keeps a record of all files on the hard disk so when you do a search on the hard drive it is faster. There is a downside to this and because the computer has to index all files, it will slow down normal file commands like open, close, etc. If you do not do a whole lot of searches on your hard drive then I suggest turnning this feature off:


1. Open my computer
2. Right click your hard drive icon and select properties.
3. At the bottom of the window you'll see "Allow indexing service to index this disk for faster searches," uncheck this and click ok.
4. A new window will pop up and select apply to all folders and subfolders. It will take a minute or two for the changes to take affect but then you should enjoy slightly faster performance.

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!
 
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Additionally, Are you installing your OS to the Raid array? I am just curious to see if/what would happen with the OS installed to the IDE drive ( one d740x ), then capture to the striped array ( consisting of 2xd740x ). While not a cure it would narrow things down a bit in the terms of trouble shooting.

It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!
 
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Thanks for the good info Ncongneto.

As you read the rest of this, please keep in mind that if I can help find out what the problem with the nforce write speed is, I am more than willing. This particular problem has cost me about $600.00 US in actual cash outlay over what I intitially had invested and I have spent 4 separate nights working all night and went in to work 12+ hours the next day. I must have over 80 hours invested now, and quite frankly this has pushed me beyond mad.

I have always had the Bootable Win XP Pro, all software, pagefiles, drivers, and everything but captured data on a single D740X connected to the onboard ide secondary master.

I have always had nothing on the Raid 0 array, It is merely for capture and editing.

I gave up on getting pci bandwidth to work with the nforce chipset.

I went and bought an msi k7t 266a and xtasy 5864 geoforce2.
I came home, put my original side raid 100 in with mem and cpu and fan.
booted up... and accidently booted from the HD (I was going to reinstall xp clean and forgot to set cd boot in bios) ... guess what?
it came up fine, for once I did not need to activate the Win xp pro even though I had changed the MB out and put in new vid card and raid card.
my old raid congiguration was still there and ready to rock even though it was set up with an adaptec 1200A. I put my dv500+ cd in and fired up DVexpert. 40mb/s write and 45 mb/s read for a 500mb test file..... HELL YES finally after three weeks, two nvidia MB's, two raid cards, and countless hours.... it appears to be an nvidia compatibilty problem.

with DVexpert on the single c: drive, I get about 25mb/s write and 30 mb/s read.

I could not get the 128k or bigger stripe size to work, or get any of the drivers (that I tried 2.31) for the highpoint raid to work, but the default winxp is fine.

installed the rest of my goodies, (DV500+, 56k modem, and software) and set about to capture and play video (720x480 ntsc 29.97fps millions color depth).... no problems, no dropped frames..... getting the modem to work was more trouble than anything... had to pick driver manually.

I noticed the pci latency is 64 when I was cruising the Bios. Running 133 fsb, and cas 2 have not tried to optimize any yet.

Something tells me nvidia has cheated with the pci bus to make the benchmarks that rely on read speed high... I could get 80mb/s read from the same raid setup on the nvidia, but that 2.84mb/s write was hard to swallow...

If you were dropping frames in capture, your actual write speed had to drop below 3.6 mb/s. Any how I have give up on nvidia chipsets till a lot of people start getting them to work.. The Asus tech help man told me they did not support video editing on an AMD machine. He should have said AMD/nforce.

I have not upgraded the bios, or used any pci tweaking utilities it basically came out of the box flying. I bought my stuff at Comp USA, and I would like to thank them for support in taking back my test 1200A raid card. MWave was really good in getting me out another MB to try too.

Asus don't need to worry about me anymore, I will have a sour taste for a while there.

I know some problems are bound to come up yet, but it is sure nice to capture a couple of clips from my analog HI 8 and manipulate them with premier and not have any problems.

k7t 266a rev 2.0 (pro2, no raid, no usb 2.0)
512 x 2 kingmax ddr1&ddr2
TT volcano 7 on a AMD 1800+
AGP: xtasy 5864 (gforce2)
pci slot2: DV500+
pci slot3: IWILL side raid 100 Raid 0 (2) maxtor D740X
pci slot5: hsp 56 micro modem
onboard ide primary master: hp DVD 100i (I like this)
onboard ide primary slave: Sony cdrom
onboard ide secondary master: Maxtor D740X
350 watt ps amd sticker
4 case fans
dbracket installed.
3.5 floppy.
Win XP Pro

I'll be checking through now and again.... without nforce you will find success easier.

cass.

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Sorry, I don't understand what you are asking for Labdog.

Could you expand or rephrase?

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Something tells me nvidia has cheated with the pci bus to make the benchmarks that rely on read speed high... I could get 80mb/s read from the same raid setup on the nvidia, but that 2.84mb/s write was hard to swallow...
Click to expand...
Maybe but I kind of doubt it. The reason being you were getting more than acceptable transfer rates on your single IDE drive, This would point more to a incompatability with your RAID card. There is something you could do to test your theory. Are you able to use your raid card ( either) as just a simple contoller (just one drive)? If so, install one of the two drives one the secondary IDE contoller and another one on the adaptec card. Compare scores of each ( seeing how write is your problem I recomend ATTO). Are they simular? have you eliminated the possibility of haveing a bad drive? After this is all goes well try setting up a software RAID stripe in WINXP and see if you still have the same problem.


It's not what they tell you, its what they don't tell you!<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by ncogneto on 02/24/02 02:49 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
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OK, I did configure the Iwill Raid as a standard controller with both 2 drives master (one each channel) and one drive master on each channel with the other channel unplugged. In all cases, the write speed was always 2.84mb/s whether using as a controller, or raid0. The only thing that ever changed was the read speed. The read speed would be about 50 mb/s from one drive, and about 80 mb/s from a raid 0 two drives. Using 100mb test file. Only the pci bus raid card show write performance issues... the onboard performance was always great with both the msi and the asus MB.

There is no way the controller or the drives are bad, because I sit here now with 40GB of video on the same Raid card and drives connected to a K7t266a MB. I Have had no errors or problems editing video all day using DV500+ and premier.

I used a really dumb test to double check my write results with DVExpert. I would just grab a 100-200 mb folder and drag copy it over to the raid in windows.... I would use a watch and time it. Always the results seemed plausible with what the test program was giving me... 30 seconds to copy a 100mb folder is way out of reason for a raid 0 ata 100 with 2 40 Gb drives.

I will concede that the problem most likely has a sofware or bios fix, but I never found it.


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sorry, I was in way too big of a hurry. Maybe this will be better.

one configuration I tried was the Raid card with two drives connected. Each drive was connected to the end (master) of its own cable and connected to an IDE connector on the raid card. I then used the raid configuration bios to deleted the raid from the drives and set up each drive as an individual drive (using the raid card as a two channel controller). I then booted up and intitialized each drive, partitioned and formatted each drive. When I brought up My Computer I could see Three hard drives: one connected to my onboard IDE secondary master called C:. one connected to the Side Raid 100 channel 1 master called Raid1. one connected to the Side Raid 100 channel 2 master called Raid2.

Using Dvexpert to write and read a 100mb test file to the drives would yield the following results.
C: 20mb/s write about 45mb/s read
Raid1 2.84mb/s write and about 40-45mb/s read
Raid2 2.84mb/s write and about 40-45mb/s read

Then, I disconnected the hard drives from the Iwill raid card one at a time and retested. The procedure was basically to power down the system, pull the power plug and then remove the 80 pin conductor IDE cable connecting a hard drive to the controller, remove the power plug from the unused drive, and power the system back up after reconnecting power plug to the system.

Doing this, both drives alternately showed nealy exactly the same performance. This time when I brought up the system and went to My Computer, I would only see two hard drives, c: and one drive (either Raid1 or Raid2)connected to the Raid controller.

C: 20mb/s write about 45mb/s read
Raid1 2.84mb/s write and about 40-45mb/s read

Reconnect drive 2, disconnect drive 1

C: 20mb/s write about 45mb/s read
Raid2 2.84mb/s write and about 40-45mb/s read

I did not experience any problems with the drives being recognized or invalid media, but full format took a long time (approx. 40 minutes to 1 hour).

I never tried to use the disks connected to the raid controller as a boot partition. I never loaded any system files on the disks other than what file system data the OS put there when formatting.




Termination for XP Activation<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by cass on 02/25/02 01:29 PM.</EM></FONT></P>
 
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