Does your board have the Intel raid controller? If it does you have to enable it in the BIOS and the easiest way to set it up is using the Intel Matrix Storage Controller utility found on your MB disc or from the Intel website.

Richard Knight

Having just set up a system with two RAID 0 arrays, one on the Intel X79 controller, the other on an on-board Marvell 88SE9172 controller, it seems to me that neither is up to much.  The PPBM5 disk in/out test takes virtually the same time on either array - 460 seconds.

This has made me realise how the PPBM5 rank order is skewed in favour of RAID 5 arrays on external controllers, as anything less takes a disproportionate time on the disk in/out test.  The other tests are far less affected by inferior hardware.

Alan,

Those extremely long disk I/O times indicate that you may have a problem with proper tuning. For example, you might have far too many background processes going on in your system.

By the way, with my particular i7-2600K main rig with the P8P67 Pro motherboard, I consistently got just under 60 seconds in the Disk I/O test with one two-disk RAID 0 array (or one of the arrayed pairs) connected to the onboard Intel SATA controller. The overall total time in CS5.5 of around 230-ish seconds is clearly caused by my system's particular GTX 470, which resulted in a time of around 110-ish seconds in the MPEG-2 DVD test.

Harm,

In addition to what I stated above, even my budget i5-2400 auxiliary rig produces a result of around 80 seconds in the Disk I/O test in PPBM5. And that's with only 8GB of RAM installed in that system. I could shave some more time off of the MPEG-2 DVD result on that system by upgrading the total system RAM from 8GB to 16GB since the 153-second time is par for a non-Ti GTX 560 on an i5-2xxx system with such a relatively low amount of system RAM.

SSDs that are not in a RAID array are automatically run in AHCI mode with the Intel controller set to RAID.

Randall, Harm,

I have turned off everything On Bill Gehrke's list, plus everything on the old Edius list, plus some others on the Black Viper list.  The only downside from Harm's viewpoint is the Matrox MXO2 that is installed, but this is not used in PPBM5, so can it still slow things down as is alleged?

On the other two tests the system matches the first X79 system in your chart.

One thing puzzles me greatly about PPBM5 - everyone knows that you need to have two, or better three disks in addition to your OSD drive, yet PPBM5 has project file, assets, Preview files, media cache, and exports all on the same drive?  Or have I completely mis-understood the instructions?

My own current project has project file on a single drive (D), captured video on the Intel RAID 0 (E), Media Cache and preview files on the Marvell RAID 0 (F) and export files on a single drive G.  The two AIDs are backed up to an external eSATA drive.

The other thing that puzzles me is the set up of the RAID.  I enabled the RAID in BIOS, switching from the default ACHI, but when I arrived in Windows, it seemed that I still had to format the drive.  This makes me suspect that I actually have a software RAID, rather than the intended Intel/Marvell controller RAID.

I think that this paragraph touches on where Percoplus is coming from in post 10.

Could you enlighten us both here, please?  My feeling is that setting up the RAID in BIOS should be it, one should not have to format the drives in Windows.

Percoplus,

I hope you do not feel that I have Hijacked your thread - I think we are both in the same difficulty here.

Harm,

I discovered the links problem too late, and of course I cannot edit. The initial http:// should not be there, it was added automatically by the forum software.

The process you describe is what I did.  In the Intel RST guide it says that, in Disk Management you will be asked to initialise the disk before you can access it.  Having clicked OK, you should R click  on Disk ) and click "New Simple Volume" and then follow the instructions in the wizard.  That is not what I did.

Thanks for the help.

Alan Craven wrote:

 

I have turned off everything On Bill Gehrke's list, plus everything on the old Edius list, plus some others on the Black Viper list.  The only downside from Harm's viewpoint is the Matrox MXO2 that is installed, but this is not used in PPBM5, so can it still slow things down as is alleged?

 

Yes, do not know why but we have seen the effects from many users.

 

One thing puzzles me greatly about PPBM5 - everyone knows that you need to have two, or better three disks in addition to your OSD drive, yet PPBM5 has project file, assets, Preview files, media cache, and exports all on the same drive?  Or have I completely mis-understood the instructions?

 

Early PPBM test we did have it set up to allow some flexibilty in PPBM file locations, this caused major confusion from users so we simplified it to having all files in one location.   If you put all the files on the fastest disk or array it is a faster result than say a RAID project disk and exporting to a single disk drive.  If you really want to use a seperate drive or array you can CUT the output files and Paste them to the project location to make the script work.  Notice I said CUT as copy will end up changing the file created/modified times and will not work.

 

Could you enlighten us both here, please?  My feeling is that setting up the RAID in BIOS should be it, one should not have to format the drives in Windows

 

Not true.you have to format after setting up in the BIOS

Also be aware that you cannot easily go into the BIOS and switch back and forth between IDE, ACHI and RAID after installing the OS

 

As Bill stated, "Simple". Any other choice of volume will completely defeat the Intel firmware raid, forcing the use of Microsoft's software RAID instead.

What is "Bill Gehrke's list"?