Problem with Adaptec SCSI Card 29320A-R

[X-System]

Hello,

I have a problem with my controller card : Adaptec SCSI Card 29320A-R on PCI-X.

My 4 hard drives SCSI U320 RAID-0 can't to do over 160 MB/s.






I don't understand why for this problem. I seek everywhere and I did not find.


My motherboard is ASUS NCCH-DL.


Do you know to find to solve this problem ?


Thank you for to answer me.

[ShawnMcGrail]

Try installing Windows 98 or anything older/ a Linux based OS and run HDtach... Its a stupid, horrible, IDIOTIC driver limitation that Microsoft implemented on us to torture our souls... Like usual...

I know there is a fix for it out there, somewhere, but trying to find it is like trying to find a... something small is a larger mass of something bigger?

[Think]

I have the same controller card and am in the process of installing it on my Asus P5WDG2-WS pci-x (133mhz). Did you run all 4 drives as a Raid 0? Raid 0+1 or Raid 1+0?

Did you install the latest bios for the controller card? 4.30.0

Which operating system?

What stripe size?

Is the pcix slot set to AUTO,133 or 100mhz?

[Think]

This might help. Going to try it out.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;811392

[X-System]

I have the same controller card and am in the process of installing it on my Asus P5WDG2-WS pci-x (133mhz). Did you run all 4 drives as a Raid 0? Raid 0+1 or Raid 1+0?

Did you install the latest bios for the controller card? 4.30.0

Which operating system?

What stripe size?

Is the pcix slot set to AUTO,133 or 100mhz?

I run all 4 drives as a RAID-0.

My card is already the latest BIOS.

I use Windows 2003.

It's 64K stripe size.

My NCCH-DL use PCI-X 66 MHz (528 MB/s maxi) but I don't find where is to set to a PCI-X frequency in BIOS.

[Think]

Well I've tried everything as well. I've used a seperate IDE drive for the OS ( dual boot xp32 and xp64). The frequency adjustments for my motherboard are on the board itself and not in the bios. Mine is set to 133mhz. I've called Adaptec on this and they first blamed that it was because the OS was on the same drive as my test drive. Seagate said it may be the firmware of my drives, so:

I've updated my drives to latest firmware - no difference
I've placed both OS on seperate IDE control and had the scsi run drives as a spare.

I noticed that I got 240mb/s burst speed with a single drive but in Raid-0 (either 2 drives or even 3) it was worse, down to 203mb/s. The last thing adaptec said was this:

I am responding to your question concerning the Adaptec SCSI Card
29320A-R controller.

The software we use is Iometer. It can be downloded from iometer.org.
The parameters can be dowloaded from the following link:

http://www.adaptec.com/support/files/

Filename is: IOMETER.ZIP

Password is: PANOZ

The card is optimized for best performance by default. There is nothing
that we can tweak in the BIOS of the controller to make it "go faster".
There are many other factors that affect the transfer rate.

Please understand that the 320MB/sec is not the actual throughput, but
the maximum burst transfer rate.


To check the true performance of your hard drive and the SCSI
controller card you really need a SCSI Bus Analyzer. When you are
testing the throughput with a benchmark program you are only seeing the
data that is read into memory AFTER SCSI communications overhead,disk
seek time,read time,latency time,head switch time, bus on/off time,
etc.
To top that off, the disk platter speed and the density of data within
a track all affect just how much data in a finite time period is
read. That is the throughput.


If this reply did not answer your questions or you need further
assistance please contact us again.

If you prefer, we do offer phone support. In the United States, we can
be reached at 408-934-7272 or 321-207-2000.

Our support hours are 5AM to 5PM Pacific Time (8AM to 8PM Eastern
Time).


Thank you for using ASK US
Best Regards
Adaptec Technical Support

I suggest you give them a call as well or email them. There is definitely something wrong.

[X-System]

All is OK for my hard drives RAID ! Tanks you for help.

I tested with IOmeter that the Adaptec support also said to me for IOmeter.

My hard drives RAID make 175~185 MB/s

Don't use HDTach for any hard drives SCSI RAID. It's limited speed. Use only IOmeter for this hard drives SCSI RAID.