Quote Originally Posted by owcraftsman View Post
I realize it's 2 different formats but some how I was expecting better performance out of the new board
We haven't given up yet as Grinch shows his drives are doing fine.

I think apart from all the tweaks like stripe & cluster size partition size etc the choice of drives would make a fair difference too. I used to get about the same if not marginally better than you on my NF4 with 2 x 250gb maxline 3 samsung's but as Grinch has shown us 2 x 150gb Raptors put then to shame on the 680i.

I cant see how the 680 performance could be too far down on the older NF4 controller I think we just need to find the groove.

I have a 100mb/s 2 disk array for £40 & if I wanted to get close to Grinch's £300 Raptors I could bung another £20 drive in there & I reckon that would be real nice & quick for the money.

Quote Originally Posted by AlphaHeX View Post
There is sth wrong with the RAID controller on that mobo. I have 2x120GB SATA in port 1 and 2 (RAID0, 32kb stripe) and 2x160GB SATA II in port 3 and 4 (RAID0, 32kb stripe). I'm running Windows XP 64. The trick to turn off read caching and command queuing is decreasing my performace Moreover my SATA II drives are set by Windows to be 1st generation of SATA Please look at performance of my drives, my old 120GB drives are reaching 204.3 MB/s but these new SATA II drives only 196.8 MB/s.
It may be that the older 150mb/s drives are dragging the controller down to there speed & therefor not allowing your 300mb/s drives to run any faster (this is just a guess)

I can switch from SATA 1/150mb/s & SATA 2/300mb/s using IBM/Hitachis ftool perhaps there is a tool that will allow you to enable SATA 2 on your older drives.

If you de select the "Let BIOS select transfer mode" this will un grey out the transfer mode box & may allow you to change from SATA 150 to 300.

The difference between 196 & 204mb/s on the burst is not worth worrying about imo you can get that much deviation due to the drives being fragged up a bit.