SII 3114 Raid Card Performance Issues

[the garynator]

So I bought this card: http://www.monoprice.com/products/p...=10407&cs_id=1040702&p_id=2667&seq=1&format=2 a couple of weeks ago and installed it. Initially I planned on running a Raid 5 config with 4 WD 3200AALS hard drives. I set the RAID 5 up and when I was copying data to it I noticed it was going obnoxiously slow. So I benched it with HD Tune and it said the transfer rate was about 10MB/s average with something like 21% cpu usage (I know the cpu usage is probably pretty close to what it should be with software raid, but figured I'd include the info for reference).

I thought it might have been because of the raid 5, but my buddy tested his 3 drive raid 5 and he was getting around 80+/- MB/s transfer using his onboard Intel Matrix raid. So I thought maybe it was just that the card was a piece, so I removed the drives from the array and went to 4 seperate drives instead. This helped, but I'm still benching (as well as realworld) at 20MB/s +/- average transfer rate (read as well as write).

I tried updating the drivers to the most current ones, this did not help. I've read about some performance issues with this chipset, but it seems that people are still getting much higher transfer rates than I am. Any ideas why this would be performing so slow? I know it's PCI and whatnot, but even being PCI I would expect to see at least 60MB/s. I mean, common, I'm getting 20+ MB/s transfer rate through usb 2.0.

My current system config =
Abit IP35, bios is the most current
E4300 @ 3.87ghz
4gb DDR2
Vista x64

Drive config:
Connected to IP35's onboard SATA ports:
WD 74gb Raptor (benched at 60MB/s average transfer)
Seagate 500gb 16mb cache (benched at 63MB/s transfer)
WD 3200KS
WD 3200AALS (Same as the drives connected to the raid controller...This one benched at around 80MB/s average transfer)
Liteon 16x SATA DVDRW

Connected to the PCI Raid card:
WD 3200AALS
WD 3200AALS
WD 3200AALS
WD 3200AALS

This is ticking me off since the whole reason I decided to go with internal drives was because I do a lot of large file transfers back and forth to different drives. I know buying a better card would probably solve my problems, but I'm a bit strapped for cash at the moment (just upgraded my computer as well as car repairs and christmas lol). So any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[the garynator]

No one has any ideas?

 

[Automata]

Wow, that is insanely slow.

It isn't completely clear in your post, but did you plug just one drive into the card and test?

EDIT: YHPM

 

[TimoneX]

Sounds like a nerfed card. Can you try it in a different PC? Maybe ensure that nothing else is utilizing PCI bandwidth and retest? SiL controllers have never been the best, but even the onboard 3112 I have running with an ancient 160GB maxtor is getting 60MB/s or so reads.

 

[the garynator]

Wow, that is insanely slow.

It isn't completely clear in your post, but did you plug just one drive into the card and test?

EDIT: YHPM

I haven't tried running a single drive in the card yet, but when I did the benchmarking, I made sure the computer was idle (and obviously only tested 1 at a time.

Sounds like a nerfed card. Can you try it in a different PC? Maybe ensure that nothing else is utilizing PCI bandwidth and retest? SiL controllers have never been the best, but even the onboard 3112 I have running with an ancient 160GB maxtor is getting 60MB/s or so reads.

I hope it's not nerfed, I don't know if I want to pay the $5ish to send back a $17 card that I already paid $5 shipping for lol. I'm pretty sure the PCI bus wasn't being used much, if at all, as the only pci card I have is the raid controller.
I'm going to try to install the utility for the card, but with my luck it won't support x64 lol. Maybe that will shed some light on it.

Thanks for the responses guys, anyone else have any ideas?

 

[Lifthanger]

you could try software raid in windows, or w/e you're using as OS.
Maybe this chip supports raid-5 but it's just a controller.
other problem could be the pci bus which is limited to about 133MB/s. with 4 drives sending data back and forth, this might be the problem.

got a 4 drive raid 5 on the same chip on a pci card, but with two drives connected to the motherboard controller. this works well for me (linux software raid).

 

[madhatter256]

Anyway you can update the BIOS of that RAID card?

There might be a new one that probably addresses that issue.

Also, I thought that the SiL3114 raid chip was only capable of RAID1/0?

 

[the garynator]

Anyway you can update the BIOS of that RAID card?

There might be a new one that probably addresses that issue.

Also, I thought that the SiL3114 raid chip was only capable of RAID1/0?

Any idea where I where I could get an updated bios for the card? I did a search last night for "creative I/O"'s website and came up with nothing. Would a generic one for the Sii3114r chipset work for it? I would think it would, however, I did try a generic windows utility for the sii3114r and it didn't work.

And the specific card I have (not sure about all 3114's) supports raid 0/1/5.

 

[nd4spdbh2]

i have a similar Silicon image card but its only 2 ports... but it maxes out at 75MB/s runnin 2 drives in raid 0... so something is up

here is the page for drivers n stuff for ur card

http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?pid=28