silicon image 3114 raid 0 on windows xp

[nhdiver]

I have recently built a windows xp pc with a dfi mother board that has a sil3114 pci/sata controller chip on it. Two of the ports are connected to two samsung 160GB sata drives. When I run SiSoft Sandra disk benchmark I see an ~86MB/sec disk io rate. Frankly I expected a higher figure.

Does anyone else have any experience with a similar configuration?

My drivers are installed correctly and report a good status. I see no errors during operation.

thanks

 

[jurgen36]

Yes, I use Sata raid 0 and get very similar results. I actually get an average, not burst transfer of 91 Mbytes/sec.
Believe me your system works very well indeed. I have the Sil 3112 chipset but it is not controlled by the pci setup. It uses its own processor for operations. Regards

Jurgen

 

[nhdiver]

Thanks Jurgen, I appreciate the feedback. The ~86MB/sec is a sustained rate. Currently I have it configured for two stripes with a 64KB chunk size.

Would altering these parameter have much effect on this data rate? such as increasing stripes from two to four? or what about the chunk size bigger smaller?

I'll probably leave the configuration as is unless I get some solid information indicating performance increase.


>Yes, I use Sata raid 0 and get very similar results. I >actually get an average, not burst transfer of 91 >Mbytes/sec.
>Believe me your system works very well indeed. I have the >Sil 3112 chipset but it is not controlled by the pci >setup. It uses its own processor for operations. Regards
>Jurgen

 

[jurgen36]

The chunk size will depend on your applications. If you use short files like most wordprocessor files 64 kbyte would be to big. However if you use, as an example files of 90 kilo or so they would spread over both drives. I myself use chunk sizes of 16 kilo only. I found by experiment that this is the best for my applications. But believe me your transfer rate is in the top bracket. I would not change anything. A single Sata drive transfers sustainable rates of about 48 Mbytes. A single IDE 133 drive only transfers between 35 and about 41 Mbytes a second. It depends on the speed of the drives and the cache memory. Regards

Jurgen