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Best Bios and drivers for HP370 of TH7II

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mahniex

Registered
Joined
Feb 3, 2002
Location
Malta
I am a bit confused about the best Bios and RAID drivers for HP370 of TH7II.
I have upgraded to the 38 bios for the motherboard and that includes the highpoint bios. My current driver for the raid is version 2.0.1019.0. I have Windows XP.
When I tried to download the 2.31 driver from the highpoint site, I actually got an older XP driver which gave much worse results.
I am benchmarking with Sisoft Sandra as the HDtech benchmarks for the XP are not shareware and are ridiculously priced!!!!:mad: :(
Anybody using this setup with Win XP and if so with what drivers?
 
Although I have a ST6-R, I have the same HP370 RAID controller and using XP. I DL'd the 2.31 drivers as well and they installed as HighPoint 25/01/2002 2.31.0.0 in device manager.

Are you sure they were installed correctly? Are the DL'd drivers named "driver_v231_370_372.zip"?

Maybe its a driver issue with that 38 bios then.
 
One word of caution here, Sandra is great for CPU and Memory benching, but don't trust the hdd scores. It is notorious for giving varying results that can not be trusted. I have the full HDTach which will give you the burst numbers under an NT environment, but will not do the write test.
 
Thanks for the answers!. The problem is that you are warned to install the RAID driver with the same number as that on the BIOS. In my case this being an ABIT TH7II board with the 38 update, I believe it is version 2.0something and not 2.3. Is it necessary to update the RAID BIOS too and if so with what?
I am very unimpressed with the RAID performance till now and in fact I think I have a faster performance with just "unRAIDED" HDs!!:eek:
I have tried 16 and 32 K stripping till now. I do have two different HDs (an IBM GXP60 and a Seagate BarracudaIV) both at 60G. I initially had 2 IBMs but had to RMA the first one as it never worked. I then learnt (from these forums) about how reliable IBM GXPs are, and decided on the Seagate instead.:rolleyes:
 
HERE'S THE FIX FOR MY RAID PROBLEM, MIGHT BE YOURS AS WELL

I had been frustrated at my RAID setup ever since I got my VP6, over a year ago. I now have the TH7II-RAID, and until a week ago I thought I'd never fix my RAID problem.

I was only using SANDRA as the benchmark but I was always getting a score that was slightly worse than a single drive.
I have four IBM75GXP 30Gig drives in a 0+1 Setup. I was racking my brain to try and figure it out and I actually thought that there had to be a problem with my HPT Controllor chip on my VP6, thus the change to the TH7II-Raid. But that didn't solve the problem.

So, during a reformat of my HDs, I decided to create a partition for my Windows XP during installation. Then I went into my Drives Manager and created a Dynamic Volume that was 30Gigs.
Then I went into SANDRA and benchmarked that new volume.
And for the first time I actually saw a score that was just a couple points below what SANDRA had listed for Two 30Gig HDs in a
RAID 0 setup.

I was very relieved that it finally worked, unfortunately my drives are going bad and I think it's the heat issue. I am now only using two drives in a RAID 0 setup because my other two keep crashing.
And another one of my drives is about to go out because it's making that Read/Write of Death sound:(
 
Mahniex,

Your in luck I just trashed my setup this weekend and spent all weekend reinstalling and testing drivers. I was originally getting anywhere from 10000 - 15000(if I was lucky) in Sandra. But I am now getting 35000 - 40000 with Sandra. This is what I had to do to get these benchs. First of use 2 ATA 100 cables with your drives set to Master on 2 seperate channels. Second you need to make sure and install the drivers (v2.0.1019) during the install when it asks for an additional driver (F6) key. You will get a small option to use the 98, 2000 or XP driver for the Highpoint, select XP. Then install XP and retest.

P.S. I got my drivers on Abits Site. Just look to the lower right hand corner and follow the links!
 
I've actually done all of that Rodzilla. I also tried the 2.3 driver from Highpoint yesterday. I don't advise doing the same - it trashed my hard drive and WinXP would not load - fatal error - not even in safe mode.:mad: I had to reformat everything.
Today I tried SisoftSandra again and i got 37939 - and I was using kazaa at the same time!!!!! I did not change anything in the settings and my driver is the same as yours. i think that Sandra is totally unreliable when it comes to HD benchmarking. I wish i could get a copy of HDTAch that works on XP!!!!;)
 
mahniex,

I feel your pain but I don't think you are going to get better bench's than that! Like said I was getting 10000-15000. I almost fell off of my chair when it posted 40000. Not bad and let me tell you I can tell a major difference in HD performance! I just zipped a set of files of 130megs in a few seconds! Now that rocks!

Sorry to hear about your HD crashing. That just happened to me also! SUX!!!
 
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