poor performance with intel rapid storage RAID 1

i have a pair of WD 750gb scorpop black 7200rpm drives in raid 1 array on the alienware m18x laptop. the performance with the intel rapid storage software is extremely poor.

crystaldisk benchmark results are about 45MB/s read and 87MB/s write. latest hdtune results are about 50MB/s read. the array is 66% full.

when i take they array out of raid completely the performance almost doubles, about 90MB/s for both read and writes with crystaldisk and about 90MB/s read in hdtune.

the original installed driver was 10.1.2.1004. when i attempt to instal the newest version of intel rapid storage v10.6 the installation fails. when i attempt to instal a slightly older version 10.1.0 (if i remember it right) the installation warns me that the mobile express raid controller v10.1.2.1004 is installed and is newer and if i want to continue. well, i do not have that versions or any version installed as i uninstalled intel rapid conrollers....if i continue the instal the v10.1.0 fails the same as the newest version.

so i am in limbo here and annoyed. when i installed the fresh OS on this array i did it the classic way where i setup the array in CTRL-I raid bios. it's windows 7 and it should not need the F6 disk. both drives are showing up properly in the intel rapid storage meny when the default drivers are installed but the performance does not make any sense. even enabled write-back cache lowers performance on these synthetic benchmarks.

 

What error do you get? Can you post the logfile of the failed Intel Rapid Storage installation IntelIRST.log?
Did you enable the write back cache via Device Manager or via the Intel Rapid Storage application?
Am I right, you're using the default raid driver iaStorV.sys of Windows 7?

 

the error is vague in the log file;

i enabled cache in the intel rapid storage driver.

i am not sure on your last question or where to find the answer to that. i assume the intel rapid storage software is the driver itself.

i will probably take the drives out of raid, do a fresh instal on one of them and manually copy my data over, format the other drive and raid 1 them through the intel rapid storage software instead of through the raid bios menu. i assume the newest version will instal this time on a fresh OS instal...

 

Even on a fresh install you have to define the first HDD of the Raid1 array via CTRL + I. I don't think there's a difference between specifying the second HDD via CTRL + I or migrating via the UI.
The Intel Rapid Storage package consists of the driver(iaStor.sys) and the UI.
You can check the installed driver in Device Manager. The default Windows 7 driver is iaStorV.sys.
If you run into troubles during the fresh install pls post the complete logfile.

 

The newest driver installed on fresh instal. The driver ui will give me an option to create the raid array in windows once it detects another drive. I am about to do just that in a few minutes.

 

set up the raid array again through windows. it is migrating files. this is going to take forever. it does not appear to be running full single-drive speeds unless the migration is just naturally this slow.

it will take about 4 hours or so to finish. it should not take this long when these drives can easily sustain 70+MB/s. this is the speed i was averaging when copying 330gb of data to the fresh drive and that only took about an hour.

i mean, if i am still stuck at 50mb/s that is the same damn speed as the 1tb 5400 rpm samsung drives gave me in this laptop in raid 1, and i updated to the WD 7200rpm drives for better performance....

 

bah, waste of my entire day with this crap. same crap performance on a fresh instal. getting the hitatchi 7k750 drives tomorrow to see if they are affected by this.

its probably the software raid crap on this laptop. i cannot believe it cuts disk performance in half or that its highest throughput is 50MB/s regardless of how fast the drive is.

 

it turned out to be that the WD hard drives were either faulty or did not enjoy working with eachother. i switched to hitatchi 7k750 and they run raid 1 as fast as single disk.

only issue now is that one of them dropped out of the array and refused to rebuild until i took it out and formated it. now all is fine but i am worried. but i guess who cares as thats the reason i have raid 1. if it drops out again its rma time.