# Weird Raptor Raid 0 HD Tach results..



## Nonpositive (May 8, 2008)

What do these nose dives mean? One of my hard drives is iffy??


----------



## niko084 (May 8, 2008)

Your not on hardware raid.... Would be my guess...


----------



## allen337 (May 8, 2008)

Hardware raid has nothing to do with it. Looks like you have bad sectors. Ive had 2 36gig raptors that done the same thing then it flagged the smart and it was bye bye drive. May try a lowlevel format on the drives but it only saves it for a little while maye 3 or 4 weeks.  ALLEN


----------



## niko084 (May 8, 2008)

allen337 said:


> Hardware raid has nothing to do with it. Looks like you have bad sectors. Ive had 2 36gig raptors that done the same thing then it flagged the smart and it was bye bye drive. May try a lowlevel format on the drives but it only saves it for a little while maye 3 or 4 weeks.  ALLEN



Aww... But hardware raid very well can, simply because you are relying on your processor, windows and a stupid driver or software to control your drives, vs a piece of hardware.

I have never tested a raid 0 on HD Tach so I cannot say for certain, but it very well could be the cause, although not necessarily in this situation.


----------



## Nonpositive (May 8, 2008)

Thanks for the replies.



niko084 said:


> Your not on hardware raid.... Would be my guess...



Excuse my ignorance but do you mean buying a Raid controller card vs using what's on the motherboard?




allen337 said:


> Hardware raid has nothing to do with it. Looks like you have bad sectors. Ive had 2 36gig raptors that done the same thing then it flagged the smart and it was bye bye drive. May try a lowlevel format on the drives but it only saves it for a little while maye 3 or 4 weeks.  ALLEN



Unfortunately I just reformatted today..


----------



## oli_ramsay (May 8, 2008)

I personally don't think it's anything to worry about.  I get those nose dives when I run it and another app uses the hard drive at the same time.  It happened while the song on RealPlayer changed and it went down to about 8MB/s.

I think you should run HD tach again, but close all applications and even end explorer, and see if it does it again in the same part of the drive.  If not, I would say you're fine.


----------



## niko084 (May 8, 2008)

Nonpositive said:


> Excuse my ignorance but do you mean buying a Raid controller card vs using what's on the motherboard?



Well yes, but some raid controller cards are not "hardware level" raid either.
I would run a good full test on your drives to make sure they are testing good and you don't have bad sectors, during the scan watch your ram and processor usage, if its spiking pretty good you have your answer.


----------



## Nonpositive (May 8, 2008)

oli_ramsay said:


> I personally don't think it's anything to worry about.  I get those nose dives when I run it and another app uses the hard drive at the same time.  It happened while the song on RealPlayer changed and it went down to about 8MB/s.
> 
> I think you should run HD tach again, but close all applications and even end explorer, and see if it does it again in the same part of the drive.  If not, I would say you're fine.



Okay I shut everything down including antivirus and still got the same results.

This current raid is on 16kb. However my previous setup was 64kb on ATI driver and the results still looked odd:


----------



## niko084 (May 8, 2008)

Whats your processor doing during this time?


----------



## Nonpositive (May 8, 2008)

niko084 said:


> Whats your processor doing during this time?



During the test the cpu usage peaked to 10%. It mostly fluctuated between 4 and 8%. Strangely when the test was over and my results popped up the CPU jumped to 50% usage and would not stop until I clicked "done" clearing my results... what the heck..?


----------



## niko084 (May 8, 2008)

Nonpositive said:


> During the test the cpu usage peaked to 10%. It mostly fluctuated between 4 and 8%. Strangely when the test was over and my results popped up the CPU jumped to 50% usage and would not stop until I clicked "done" clearing my results... what the heck..?



Can't tell ya, but I would personally guess it was the raid driver... Probably nothing you can do about it, I wouldn't worry about it, looks like your speeds are pretty decent.


----------



## allen337 (May 8, 2008)

shouldnt spike like that, post back when the smart kicks in. Only seen this with one bad drive and it only spiked at the first 5% of the drive. Ive been using Intel raid since Intel made raid and promise raid,hotpoint raid,marvel raid, along with nvidia raid so I could be wrong.  ALLEN


----------



## lemonadesoda (May 8, 2008)

What are your hard-drive specifications. Each of them. Be comprehensive, incl. make, size, cache, interface and number of "platters" on each HDD.


----------



## Nonpositive (May 9, 2008)

Ran some tests with windows and Western Digital's LifeGaurd tool. No bad sectors detected.



lemonadesoda said:


> What are your hard-drive specifications. Each of them. Be comprehensive, incl. make, size, cache, interface and number of "platters" on each HDD.



Two of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136033


----------



## largon (May 11, 2008)

oli_ramsay said:


> I personally don't think it's anything to worry about.  I get those nose dives when I run it and *another app [and/or OS] uses the hard drive at the same time*.


I hereby quote the correct answer.


----------

