Manually assigning IRQs to raid performance? [hpt 370] [drive index]
Q: Heres the deal: KT7A-Raid, a pair of 30 gig/7200rpm/ATA100 WD hard drives in RAID 0 with a fresh install of XP. REALLY CRAPPY performance, such as 17K drive index Sandra USA. 24K for a single disc of the same type. The wizards of Redmonds OS is making my 370 HPT, GeforceMX, SB Live, and the Netgear 311 same IRQ!
1) is this normal?
2) How can I change the IRQ of the RAID controller have its own?
3) Will it make any difference?
4) WTF is going on, give me such crappy speed?
Ive tried poking around in BIOS, I can change things in XP, but no care and adjustments to what it wants. I use the latest BIOS for KT7 (64 I think), 1.11.4 or something for the HPT370 bios and installed 2.3 drivers when I XP.
please please please please PLEASE
There is someone who has installed who knows what the problem is!
Re:AWESOME!!
Yours scores a little better than mine. Mine averages 37800, and just tested at 37640, so I think you got it. Your situation with your soundcard now has me pretty convinced that thier might be a problem with Soundblaster Live! and Audigy cards when trying to setup Raid on Fat 32 partitions and the hang after the first reboot. I tried and tried and tried to install before I finally thought to remove the soundcard and try and it worked. I am glad you got your problem resolved and a cool new Logo for your POST screen and now you know what to do if you ever have to re install.
Good luck and glad you got it going
Jim
P.S. If you are going to use the Raid Administator in Windows, make sure its the 2.3 version as well or you will end up with a broken stripe and that sucks!! I can tell you that first hand, it happened to me. Keep your eyes open for anyone who was NTFS working with that type of performance on the HPT 370 or 370A and repost here if you find out how they did it.
Re:WOW! I was just going through Pauls FAQ and was reminded that I forgot to install the XP drivers for the Highpoint Controller. It turns out my pathetic score of 18,000 – 19,000 went up to near 39,000(!!!). I am sooooo glad I happened to stumble upon your thread. Thanks guys! Performance is so much better now
No need to make changes with BIOS or anything else.Re:Hey Jim!
IT WORKS! WOO HOO!! Downloaded/flashed the KT7-64 bios with the 2.3 Raid Bios and custom EPA logo, disabled ACPI, assigned my own IRQs, Fdisked/formated to Fat32 and installed XP without my soundcard in.. PRESTO! It works! 38,000 for a drive mark in Sandra! What's yours running at?
-Fuzzy
Re:I have the KT7a and have all the newest BIOS updates on the HPT. I thought I had fast drives (2 x 45gig IBM 75GXP's). Turns out that my Sandra score is only 19,000 or so. I guess I have a lot more work to do. If my computer didn't suit me so well right now I would strip out the OS and start over with positioning cards and everything…hmm…curious.
I have all my ACPI working like a charm. I put the computer in standby and it powers down everything and suspends to RAM like a champ. This is my favorite feature. All I do is press the power button and it almost immediately presents me with the XP welcome screen. In fact I tried disabling that stuff, but I couldn't live without it…
Now, If only I could find a way to wake the computer up with the keyboard…
Re:All the Bios Files that I have used from that site for my Epox 8K7A+ were just what they said they were. And the Calvin logos are cool. You can even download a utility called CBROM from their and a Caldera DR-Dos startup disk (really really small) and make your own BIOS from a dos prompt by merging the components you want. It is really easy to do, I have done it many times. So if you find a mainboard BIOS that you like, but it doesn't have the raid BIOS you want, you can simply put both on the floppy (regular BIOS with Raid bios integrated) and the RAID Bios you want and merge the two. I have the Beta BIOS for my board with every verion of Highpoint Bios from 2.0 up to 2.3. 2.0919 works the best with the 370 and 370A, although there is little difference with any version above 2.0, my system boots faster with 2.0919. There is no 8K7A+ BIOS out that has the 2.3 Highpoint BIOS (unless BIOS Mods made one recently) , but I have one.
You can check it out, and if you just don't feel comfortable doing it, or your BIOS doesn't have a "Boot Block", I wouldn't recommend trying it (CMROM). I just got so frustrated I didn't care. It got to the point that I finally decided if it didn't work, oh well, I would junk the board and buy another, so I made my own flashed it and it worked like a champ. I tried a few more and they all worked. I just took the one that worked the best, added the calvin logo and here I am.
And the ACPI option should be in Power Management in BIOS. It is on my old KA7-100 and my KT7R, and should be on yours too. It is VERY important that if your going to disable it (which I personally prefer), that you do it BEFORE you start to install XP. Its a MAJOR pain in the A** to get rid of after you install.
To be honest with you, when my Raid controller shared an IRQ with my Network card, there wasn't a hell of alot of difference in performance….less than 600 points I believe, so IRQ sharing may not be your problem. Everyone I know that has tried NTFS on the Highpoint controller with WIn XP that I know of is complaining of poor performance, slow boot times and sluggish performance. I did experiment with NTFS and the best I ever got it to perform was around 33100 on Sandra and that was with the 1.03B driver and 1.03B BIOS which aren't even supposed to support Win XP or the HPT 370A, but they worked better than the BIOS and drivers that were supposed to support it…..go figure?
You can do what you want, but if you want faster performance and your not an engineer and are intent on keeping your Raid setup and use Win XP, do yourself a favor and disable ACPI, run your raid setup utility and setup a stripe with 32K clusters and format your drive with "Format C: /Z:64 " and then install XP. DO NOT LET XP format your drive for you! I recommend the 2.0.0919 BIOS I believe is correct and the corresponding driver. They have given me better performance than anything so far. And another suggestion. before you benchmark your drive with Sandra, run your computer for at least 20 minutes and then Bench.
Good luck, If I think of anything else helpful I will repost….but gotta go for now….Ghost Recon beckons!
Jim
Re:First of all, try to find out which devices share IRQ's. For example, at www.viahardware.com, Paul's KG7 FAQ has told me that PCI slots 3 and 5, 6 and 7, and AGP slot and PCI slot 1 share IRQ's, and that 3 and 5 share with the HPT controller and 6 & 7 share with the USB ports.
Using this information, I was able to get my sound card and video card on their own IRQ's while having the others share IRQ's.
1) In your situation not quite. Definately get your video card, the GeForce 2 MX, on its own IRQ. I'll definately improve 3D performance (it did for me, about 20 fps in Giants).
2) Read my paragraph above and find out how. You'll have to do some slot switching, but you can do it.
3) Maybe. Can't hurt to try, though. BTW my RAID controller and modem are both using the same IRQ.
4) Enable DMA. For good benchmarks in Sandra, use a 64K stripe (gave me ~40,000 with RAID 0), but for real performance, try 16K (use HDTach to benchmark, it'll give you more realistic scores, since it uses smaller files for testing).
Re:Try turning off PnP OS in the bios.
In Win2k and WinXP, that option needs to be turned off.
Re:I have a KT7A board tho, I can't find where to disable the ACPI in bios
The manual talks about it, even talks about disabling it, but not how to do it.
the Raid 0 is 2 30 gig drives, so only 60 gig.
My soundcard is a Live! value… I'll have to yank it and try re-installing XP on a Fat32 Raid without it, maybe it won't lock on the first re-boot like yours? (shrug) worth a shot at this point eh?
How reliable are the bios files on that site? It would make things easier for me, and I really like the idea of those custom graphics on the bios boot screen… but I'm very leary of ending up with a paperweight instead of a mobo y'know?
Thank you very much for your help, most I've seen from anyone here yet
Re:Try this sight Bios Mods (http://www.biosmods.com) They should have the BIOS file you need. I would also recommend disabling ACPI in BIOS. It was just a huge pain in the A** for me anyway, and after disabling it and configuring my Video, Sound, Network and Raid to use their own IRQ, my system was much faster and more stable. Just make sure you go in to control panel, power options and enable APM support after your done installing or your computer won't shut down automatically anymore.
How big is your array? I have read somewhere about Fat32 and arrays over, I think 80GB giving some minor setup issues. The only issue that I have is my Soundblaster Audigy Gamer. I cannot intall XP with it in the system. Locks up after the first reboot and refuses to install. Remove the soundcard and all is well.
As for the Raid Bios and drivers, I have tried everyone from 2.0.0919 to 2.3 and they are all about the same. Not much difference in performance, and no better support for NTFS either. Performance is still pathetic. I have also used CBROM to make my own Bios files, which is what I am using now. I merged a beta BIOS for my 8K7A+ with the 2.0919 BIOS. This one works best for me, and should for you as well, as the newer Highpoint bioses are mainly updates for the HPT 372, with no listed improvements for the HPT 370.
Good luck and hope you find what your looking for
Jim
Re:Okay… sounds like some things to try. There's a few problems tho: XP wouldn't install on the Fat32 Raid 0 set-up, not continuing the install after rebooting the first time. It basically forced me into NTFS, which is why I used it. Also, I couldn't get the damned Raid bios to update. I downloaded the right stuff from HighPoint's site but the flash program would just LOCK when it went to install the new Bios. On Paul's FAQ site it says something about making sure you update the bios from the manufacturer but Abit's download area has been down so I can't get anything.
Suggestions? (sigh)
Re:Had the same problem with Xp on NTFS partition. Disk performance was pathetic and was very obviously slower booting up, accessing files and transferring files. Disk performance on Sandra peaked at 23,000. I fdisked and formatted and switched back to Fat32 and after some driver and Highpoint Bios tweaking, disk performance is back up to 38,000, and that isn't too bad for 5400 RPM ATA 100 drives.
Make sure your Highpoint driver and BIOS versions match. I am using an Epox 8K7A+, which uses the HPT 370A, with the 2.0919 RAID Bios and the 2.0.1019 driver. I first ran the Raid setup utility and set my stipe size at 32K. Then I ran FDisk and formatted my drives with command "Format C: /Z:64" This has given me better performance than any setup I have tried, and believe me, I tried for 3 months to get NTFS to work on the Highpoint controller with no success, and even went back to Win ME at one point before I did some research. You are not the only one having the problem with XP and the Highpoint Raid controller, I have read these posts on alot of different sites and most of them were from people trying to use NTFS partitions on the Raid controller. Don't know of anybody who got it to work with any speed at all. On mine, disk performance was always slower than a single drive and boot up time was almost 2 minutes. Now my Sandra score averages 37,800 and my system boots in less than 45 seconds from power button to desktop. I am using 2 5400RPM Maxtor drives, and they ain't exactly speed demons, but I am very pleased with the performance so far after switching back to Fat32.
Probably not what you wanted to hear, but I have done this on mine and two friends computers and resolved the problem. If you happed to find out what the problem with the Highpoint Controller and NTFS in XP, let me know, I would love to hear it.
Good luck
Jim:cool:
Re:Sharing of IRQs is normal with PCI devices and any slow down by it will be a matter of microseconds, not something you'd notice.
Re:Maybe this will shed some light on the subject for you…..Link (http://www.{$MySite}/guides/viewfaq.html?i=47)
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Tags: drive index, hpt 370