You are awesome. Thank you so much for being so nice and supportive of all the previous posts and so helpful throughout. You have sold me on the drive and raid0. Thank you so much.

Depending on where you are living Fry’s electronics is a good bet (which is where I get my cables). But you are right, the 300 Mbps cables are a bit more rare than the 150 Mbps cables.

Try this search for online availability of SATA cables: http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=sata+cable+300&hl=en&btnG=Search

Let me know if I can be of any further assistance.

Good luck!

You wrote that you had your raid set up as 1+0. Try setting it up as raid 0 only (for testing purposes). When installing Windows, also make sure that you install the raid drivers provided on the disk (you’ll need to press F6 at the beginning of the setup process).
Run HD-Tach on this new Windows installation, and see what you drive speeds are. They should be significantly higher. My initial guess is that because you set up your raid to be mirroring, the mirroring process is slowing down your speeds you would gain by striping alone (striping is raid 0, mirroring is raid 1). If you want to stick with mirroring, try setting it up as raid 0+1 instead of raid 1+0. That way the striping process may take precedence over the mirroring process. I haven’t experimented with these settings myself (yet) since I only have 3 hardddrives, but will likely do so in the future when I upgrade to either 4 or 6 harddrives. Please share you findings, I’m interested to see what happens.

Cheers,
Mike

Also, I’m not sure what your BIOS settings look like, but you might want to read through your manual and check if you have to explicitly enable the 3Gb/s setting (it may default to 1.5Gb/s).

I’ll post more if I find anything else. Good luck!

Mike

thanks,

Chuck Bigbie

You pose some very fair questions. However, I have to warn you that I cannot give you any hard facts, I can only tell you my observations in all of this (I’m no hardware tech, and my benchmarking was only a semi-solid solution that works for me to highlight the performance).

First off, you are totally right about the SATA cables. There is only a minimum difference in performance. My observation has been that the aftermarket SATA 300 cables were of substancially higher quality, as well as larger diameter wiring, than the cheap ones supplied with most motherboards. All in all, I would only expect someone to get the aftermarket cables if they needed every last bit of performance, say in server clusters, graphics processing, audio processing, and that sort; the average user wouldn’t or couldn’t even tell the difference.

As far as what controls the speed difference between 150 and 300 MB/s? Well, I think it’s a combination of the controller and the harddrive. The reason I think the harddrive has alot to do with it is because even the 300 Gb/s harddrives are packaged as 150 by default. You have to manually enable the 300 MB/s feature using manufacturer software, which will then reconfigure the ROM on the harddrive. I’m not sure how much the controller plays into this, because I don’t have to change any settings in the BIOS for the controller. So it may actually only be the harddrive that determines the limits. However, you won’t get 300 MB/s out of a controller that is designed for only 150 MB/s.

I know these aren’t the cold hard facts, but perhaps they’ll lead you to some in your research. Let me know what you find out, I’d be interested.

Cheers,
Mike