Raid 0 set up correctly?

[SyrousPL]

:help:Hello,
I've got 2 Seagate Barracudas set up as Raid 0 (did that through bios). I tried to run some benchmarks (Sandra, HD Tach, Atto), but the benchmarks don't seem to detect RAID, only the individual drives. Windows shows my two 320 gb drives as one 640 gb, so I think it knows it is a Raid array. I worry that maybe I'm not getting the best performance and that something is not set up right.
Both drives are SATA connected to connectors 1 and 2, which are supposed to be controlled by NV Raid on the motherboard.
I just don't understand why the benchmarks don't see a Raid 0, but instead they see 2 separate drives... Anyone knows if there is something that has to be done in Windows to fix that? Or is it a normal situation?
Thanks,

My rig:
MSI K8N Neo Platinum
1 GB RAM, Win XP SP2, AMD FX-57, Ati X800XL
:canadianwave:

 

[SyrousPL]

Screen shots of benchmarks

By the way, here are some screen shots of the benchmarks and windows properties....

Screen shots of the benchmarks:

http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d163/sochap/win-properties1.jpg
http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d163/sochap/win-properites2.jpg
http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d163/sochap/sandra-selecting-hd.jpg
http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d163/sochap/HD-tach-1.jpg
http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d163/sochap/atto-bench-1.jpg

hard disk link: Seagate Technology - Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 320-GB Hard Drive
mobo link: MSI Computer Corp. - Product

 

[Jack Rabbit]

My VIA RAID shows up as one device in windows; a "VIA SARA RAID 0 SCSI Disk Device". But that is a different chipset and they do not all work the same. My game rig has nVidia RAID on an Asus board and I am having problems with the new HD so I may tear it apart again and get the RAID going. If/when I do I will let you know what I find.

It does not surprise me that the Barracuda test software does not find the drive as the RAID controller is obfuscating it somehow.

It has been a while since I read up on this but if you are getting more than 60MB/s you are probably doing OK. I would say 80ish is the best you could get from those drives.

 

[SyrousPL]

Thanks JR.
According to Seagate you can get (theoretically) "78 MB/s maximum sustained data transfer rate", so I was hoping that in RAID 0 I'd get around 100-120.
By the way, I have some more screenshots of the Nvidia RAID from bios...

http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d163/sochap/IMG_6298.jpg
http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d163/sochap/IMG_6295.jpg

 

[Jack Rabbit]

Theoretical maximums are never obtainable. You are lucky to get 50-75% of that when benchmarking and worse in real use. HDTach says I get 110MB/s from my RAID but that is a pair of 10k Raptors which, on spec, edge out your drives so I doubt you will break the 100MB/sec mark.

What do you get? And can you Google specs from others with the same board?

 

[SyrousPL]

no good...

Well, it seems I screwed up my data. I tried installing the raid drivers from nvidia, deleting the "old" array to set up the new one and now windows doesn't read the drives... Media shield (from Nvidia) is showing a "healthy" array with both drives, but what good is that when the system doesn't recognize them. I thought that if I delete the array and then re-build it the same way the data should stay intact. Maybe I was wrong.
I spent 1/2 a day trying to fix things up, but maybe it is time to format and try from scratch.

 

[SyrousPL]

fresh start

I gave up on saving the data, in the end there were only some games, photoshop and dreamweaver that I can reinstall.
However, after doing all this the new raid 0 runs faster than the old one, at least accoring to the HD Tach. I can't show the "before" benchmark as it was saved on the screwed up volume, but here is a new one - the numbers are almost double of what it used to be, except for the access time, which is roughly the same as before.

http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d163/sochap/raid0benchseagate.jpg

also here is a comparison screen shot from Atto benchmark (old one is in my 2nd post above), you can see the reading/writing vastly improved...
http://i35.photobucket.com/albums/d163/sochap/attoseagate2ndtime.jpg

So, the lesson is make sure your Raid is configured properly... and second lesson is, don't screw around with it before saving you data.
Cheers.

 

[DaleF]

I've found that hardware RAID is almost always faster than software RAID.

 

[Jack Rabbit]

Wow. That is better performance than I thought you would get. Maybe I need to check on my system! All you did was reinstall the drivers?