Some help with M17xR2 rebuild please

Hi all,

OK, so I have been having a lot of problems with my M17x R2 since i bought it. Seems to be running way too slow for the spec, and there is a lot of lag.

Currently, it is config'd as 2 x 640GB Hd's in RAID0 but I am thinking of stopping this.

Am about to rebuild, with 2 separate drives - NO raid - and with only W7 Ult not the who Dell restore stuff.

Does anyone think this is a good idea, or should I leave it as RAID0. I know I will loose the recovery partition (I have created a backup from Linux) and I have also created Alien Respawn discs in case - so should be able to return to this state at least.

Full spec of machine is:

Intel Core i7 940 Xtreme
8Gb Ram
Dual Radeon HD 5890 in Crossfire
Intel 6300 AGN card
Mata BD-RE UJ235A

Any thoughts etc welcomed. I am just unhappy with the speed and lag - this machine should do so much better. Disc access times seem to be way off for example.

Also, am going to install a Linux distro on the second drive as well this time. Was going to put on OSX as well - but too much like hard work

look forward to seeing what everyone has to say,

Regards
Sanj

 

It's probably not a bad idea to start from scratch. I would do it. The advantage of RAID 0 is that it speeds things up a little. The disadvantage is if one drive fails, you lose everything. I would just boot of the windows DVD and format both drives, and start fresh, get all the updated drivers from the various sites, and make sure you have all the installers for the programs you use, and backup all your information on an external drive so you don't lose anything. I'm running dual SSDs, and use one for all my games, and the second for my OS/apps, and installed a 1TB drive for my data storage.

 

Thanks for that. My real issue is that RAID seems to have slowed the machine down!! I am sure this is because the 2 drives are different manufacturers and not identical - I know in enterprise RAIDs I have encountered I have always insisted on identical drives.

Also, the drives are performing very slowly and I wonder if they are actually faulty. Unfortunately, Alienware and Dell diagnostics say no issues, so Dell will not help. I am expecting that once they are not in RAID mode, I may be able to see a few additional failures etc.

All the best,
Sanj

Also, network issues abound - lots of lag, freezing on data transfer.

TCPIP drivers will not correctly install - even if deleted and reinstalled [eradicated (both wiped from h/d locations with 7 passes, and removed reg keys etc)].

Just seems to me that this machine should be performing SO much better than it is.

 

what are you basing your assumption on? Are you able to game ok? You fps decent?

why don't you bench your harddrives with something like crystal benchmark just to see if you are in the ballpark

 

FPSs are very low - even in games like CIV V!! Cannot get fps above 30 in many games.

Crystal and HDINFO both fail, generally knackered performance. Long load times (5 minutes to boot to windows after using Soluto!!!)

 

Do a clean install, might even want to give a secure erase a try, but that will take a long time on two 640gb drives.

 

Agreed, completely wipe out your drives and start over. Something definitely seems amiss.

 

My thoughts exactly. However, what are the thoughts on removing the RAID to ensure no physical drive issues?

 

Personally, I would remove RAID unless you have a reason to keep it. You won't see much of a performance improvement with it, and it will definitely help troubleshoot the drives.

Considering that the drives are from different manufacturers and different models, I'd be really hesitant to do raid on them anyway.

I know it used to be (and in a number of cases still is) that to Raid a configuration you should ideally be using the exact same drive model/type. Not sure if this is causing any issue, but it's something to rule out.

If you discover you do have a bad drive, then you can always replace it with the same type/model of the good drive and then raid at that time (if you don't mind reloading from scratch)

Just some thoughts

Good luck!

 

RAID doesn't cause physical drive issues, but if you keep RAID 0 and 1 HDD fails, you literally lose everything as your data is striped onto both drives (one half on 1 drive, half on the other). Data recovery can sometimes be impossible with RAID 0 without specialized labor. The benefits of RAID 0 come nowhere close to the risks of RAID 0 should a drive fail. Your OS will boot up slightly faster, and your read/write speeds will increase, but most game bottlenecks are GPU/CPU related, not disk access.

 

You know everything you are discribing in this post sounds like exactly how things went when one of my HDD in RAID 0 went belly up. I didnt have TCPIP driver issues but I did have major issue with some other driver...which all went away after Dell sent me my replacement drives.

Do either (or both) of your manufacturers have testing software for their drive? Mine did and it gave me some sort of error (Something about the Smart...somerather...LOL too long ago to remember).

Also, as far as RAID is concerned...after configuring my rig to have RAID 0 at build, I later read several articles saying that the performance increase was only "theoretical" and RAID 0 presented little to no noticable performance increase. So I dont even know how much it is worth it to have.

 

Buy SSD and do a clean install. You'll feel the difference for sure.
Best result if you mod your win 7 (cutting off all the unnecessary stuff).

 

I agree on this