4x WD800JD Stripping really slow! any suggestions?

[tenarc]

My board is a ep-9npa+ultra with nforce 4 controller.. I put in 4 SATA drives and only get 74MB/sec average read.. If I remove 2 drives I get 68/mb sec and with 3 drives I get 80/MB sec. Obviously I get best performance with 3. But anyways, shouldn't I be getting like 150MB+ average read? I sure hope someone can send me on the right path, thanks.

[JCLW]

:welcome:

Have you tried different nV drivers? What stripe size are you using?

[tenarc]

I'm running the latest nv drivers..

I tried a deskstar 7k80 and I got 120MB/ read until after a minute and then it drops down to 60/mb which is no good for extracting dvd's.. I was hoping someone would tell me that the had drives I'm using are junk and suggest a better one thats affordable. oh well.

[Mr.Guvernment]

No, you wont get 150mb stable because harddrives are PHYSiCALLY not possible of doing that, dont get sucked in by marketing. (SATAII can not actually transfer 3g / sec either)

SATA has a "possible" 150mb / sec bandwidth - IDE has 100mb / 133mb - and harddrive still cant saturate that.

That 120mb was the "burst rate"

As for exntracting you mean ripping FROM a DVD drive?? - as a DVD drive cant rip fast enough, that is limited by the DVD drive, not the harddrive.

[Quailane]

If you are ripping a DVD to another format, it is limited by your cpu. If you are just copying the whole disk the way it is, then guv is right that your dvd drive is the weakest link.

[JCLW]

tenarc: what program are you using to test them?

Regardless of what he's doing with them, if they are striped he should get a ~150MB/s average STR using all four.

Most DVDs read at 8x (~12MB/s). Some can read at 12x (~16MB/s), and by now there may be a few that can do 16x (~24MB/s)

[tenarc]

I'm testing it with HDTach 3

By extracting DVD's I mean downloading them and repairing them then extracting the rar's.

the Deskstar score I was talking about was with 3 of them and the burst is only about a second more or less, I had sustained 120/mb sec utnil a minute and then lost all the speed which I found very strange..

Yes I should be getting 150/mb with all 4 drives and I can't understand why not.

[JCLW]

Do you have the "NVIDIA RAID Application 4.82" installed? Does it report anything out of the ordinary?

It has to be something with your nV drivers. I'm an intel guy myself so you might have to wait for someone else who knows nV RAID better.