drive speeds and disktest.exe

[unyun]

i'm having trouble with capture

i was surprised to see the results of autoconfig, which tells me my drive R/W speed was only 31 mb/sec

this drive is a 2 x U320 15,000 rpm 76 Gb SCSI (Seagate ST373453LC)

i don't know why it's running so slowly (my IDE drives are clocking 58 mb/s at only 7500 rpm)

parameters seem to be ok in bios - drive is set to optimal
i've killed winrtme; 31 mb/s is still the best i can get (?)

nothing's running in the background
i reinstalled XP to get rid of directCD packet writing software

autoconfig otherwise seems to run properly

any thoughts??

thanks in advance
mark

[Blaine Holm]

Give us some details about your system, and most importantly, what is the typoe of cable you are using to connect these two drives. You should get 100MB's per second with those drives.

Describe your SCSI cable

[unyun]

hi blaine

it's a braided SCSI cable rated for at least U160

the drives are not striped, but hardware mirrored (RAID 1)

mark

[Blaine Holm]

Ahhh, the VT does not really like hardware striped drives, becuase these burst data rather than 'stream' it. We ned the data to 'stream' from the drives.

Disable any hardware RAID, and use just the SCSI controller, and stripe the dries together in Windows Disk Management, as a software 'stripe'. Then you'll get the speeds you need.

[unyun]

blaine -

thanks for your help with this
i will try what you suggested

do i need to reformat these drives in order to stripe the drives together with Disk Management?

mark