raid card problems

[mafs65]

hi all im a bit new to all this.i have just added a 120gb wd hardrive fitted to a pci raid controller card.since then programs take ages to load first time after boot up on my main c drive..something seems to be slowing things down.i have tried stopping all programs from loading but it is still very slow after bootup.any ideas would be well recieved.,i have amd 2800 1 gb ddr ram on windows xp .gigabyte motherboard ga-7n400. raid card is ,sil 0680 ultra 133 medley ata raid controller pci slot 7 (pci bus 1 device 9 funtion 0) i have 2 drives on my main pc and this new one on the raid card.if i disable the raid controller in device manager and reboot everything is fine,aol launches very fast.as soon as i enable the raid card driver again and reboot,everything is very slow loading,aol takes ages to load.

thanks,mat

 

[fitzjj]

You are running a raid controller with one disk?

 

[mafs65]

yes ,i have two 80 gb hard drives on my main pc,and one 160gb on the raid card.it works well but slows windows and aol from running first time up.

 

[fitzjj]

The whole idea of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is to allow for data redundancy (if one disk dies you dont loose the data). I have never played around with a proper raid controller, but i expect that yours is confused as to why you only have the one disk plugged into it.

Level 1 RAID basically replicates one of your hard drives onto another, so if one dies then you still have the other.

Level 0 RAID (not true RAID - but improves performance) stripes the data across both disks, so half on one, half on the other. But if one disk dies the you loose everything.

I would assume that your raid controller is guessing that one of your disks has died and is trying to recover something... but like i said i heve never played with one so i'd wait for someone elses opinion first.

Either way i would suggest chucking two disks on the controller then you can speed them up

 

[mafs65]

many thanks for your thoughts,i will try that mate.