Hello there, Recently I bought ATA100 RAID Controller (Dawicontrol DC-100 UDMA-100 controller with Highpoint chip "HPT370") so I striped my two 80GB Seagate HDD drives in one 160GB Array. Now in my case data blocks are written inteleaved between 2 disk drives, so the performance shuld be nearly doubled... BUT the performance is actually really bad. I mean everything works so slow, much slower than before when my two HDDs were connected to primary master and primary slave IDE controller. I reinstalled my WindowsXP with no luck... It still takes ages (for exaple:) to copy something from one partition to another and when I am copying something everything else works really slow, for example I hardly open my email client when another application is accessing HDD at the same time. Does anyone know what shuld I try to do? Any tips and tricks? I know it shuld work faster... My configuration is: - BIOS Setting Utility on my RAID card is version 2.31 (and can't be flashed to newer version), - WindowsXP Drivers are version 2.34 (also tried 2.31 since same versions are recommended but with no luck) - ATA RAID Management Software is version 2.31 - My HDDs are connected: - one to primary master and another to secondary master on RAID controller (as it is said in User's Manual) - My CD-ROM and DVD-ROM are connected to Primary and Secondary Master on IDE controller - My CPU is Intel Pentium III 800EB Mhz - My Mainboard is ASUS CUSL2-C (Black Pearl) - 512MB RAM, ... Thanks, -Andrej

Have you enabled DMA? I'm not sure if you need to though for RAID. To do this, go to Control Panel, System, ..., Device Manager. Then select your hard drive array, open the properties dialogue, and look for a tick box with DMA next to it under Options. Otherwise if you're using an Intel chipset (for the motherboard), install the Intel Application Accelerator which takes care of DMA automatically. Also check that you have ATA100 cables and that the motherboard BIOS is configured for ATA100. Your RAID card should tell you if it is running at ATA100. Just one more thing, don't expect 100% increase in performance. Double speed in RAID striping with 2 HD's is only theoretical, there are other bottlenecks that will stop you getting 100% speed improvement. If you just play games\office work (infrequent access with small files) then expect nearly no improvement in gaming because that's not RAID is for, if you do video and multimedia (intense operations with big files) then it should be somewhat faster. My system is pretty similar to yours and i would say only 40% real life overall improvement in speed. My PC has 2 80Gb Maxtor HDs on ATA133 and for copying a 2Gb file it takes approx: 90s from RAID HD to a non-RAID HD, 120s non-RAID to RAID, 150s RAID to RAID. Hope this helps, Kev