Over the summer I bought a pair of Cuda IV's to go with my Abit BD7II RAID mobo. Once it all arrived I learned that in RAID 0 (two drives striped for performance -- correct me if I'm wrong) those two drives would be slower than if I had run them straight up.

Seagate confirmed this. Said there was a glitch in the firmware. Offered to upgrade the firmware on the drives for free (I declined).

Now that the Cuda V's are out, anyone know if this problem has been eliminated?

I don't think it's been fixed, but for the definitive answer, surf on over to Storagereview.com forums and you should get the straight poop.

I've been looking for that firmware update for hours. Where can you can it?

To obtain the updated firmware for your Cuda IVs, you will need to actually send in your drives for replacement. It seems like a pain in the a$$ but to me, since I'm so used to Raid performance, I thought it was worth it.

You can read about my experience from this other thread on here.

It would be a shame if Seagate didn't fix the firmware for the Cuda V line to work in Raid 0 (striping). What reason would they have to not have fixed it? I think all the other drive manufacturers don't have this issue.. just Seagate.

Can you give me a few examples of how RAID 0 performance works well for you?

Just so people know, they work just fine in RAID1

Pete

I might be blowing smoke here because I'm just trying to recall what I've read in the past. In theory, you are supposed to get double the performance with 2 drives in Raid 0. I don't remember exactly but my guess would be that I get around 1.7x-1.9x the performance of a single drive.

I use huge media files (over 1/2 GB) and sometimes need to copy them back and forth. Raid allows me to cut the time almost in half.

Also, if you are dealing with huge compressed files like .zip, .rar, etc... then it helps a lot, too.

Let's say I wanted 160gigs of HD space. So, for the nice gain in performance, I would spend the extra money to buy 2 80GB HDs over a single 160GB HD.

What about other operations? For example, just day to day stuff, is it faster? Did you load your OS on the RAID?

Based on what I've read it seems that it could add some speed to your computer since the hard drive is probably the slowest device in the system, except for your Internet connection.

I'm glad and sad that I found this forum topic. I have an Abit IT7-Max2 version 1 motherboard with 2 80gb Seagate Barracuda IVs in it and their raid performance is less than impressive. I have P/N 9T6006-301 and firmware 3.19 on both drives. They are both whiny, louder than the slave Cuda IV (P/N 9T6006-103, Firmware 3.75), and I have tried Raid 0 and Raid 1 with them. Raid 1 just produced frequent garbled/screechy sound from my Soundblaster Platinum EX soundcard, probably because data had to be mirrored to each drive and maybe that affected the sound quality. Raid 0 produced less sound distortion, and yes, I updated the latest drivers, bios, updates, etc. so updates were not the problem and I doubt the problem lies with my motherboard. After reading this post, that probably explains why my Raid performance seems to suffer.

Has anyone else noticed whiny noise from drives with the same P/N and firmware as mine, particularly in raid 0 or 1 configuration? I thank Dru for his posting and I'm going to call Seagate to see about getting my drives replaced for the ones with the firmware with better support for RAID. Maybe the replacements drives won't be whiny anymore too. I'll post an update on the sound and performance once I get the drives.

just geta 180 gxp quiet and fast. riad 0/1 cause their ibms after all

testingthis-

Do you by chance have your sound card in a PCI slot that shares resources with the RAID controller on your motherboard? (You can check this in your BIOS.) If so, you should move the sound card to a different (ideally unshared) PCI slot. This probably won't help your RAID problems, but it may clean up your sound.

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-Bigg
I want to avoid the IBM Deathstar hard drives. I used to have an IBM GXP drive last year in a Dell that failed on me 4 times in a year! I ended up selling the 5th replacement drive on eBay. Poor soul.

-Justin_R
I called Seagate yesterday and the technical support rep told me that I might have an IRQ problem, not a hard drive problem, since he said sound from cds isn't dependent on the hard drives. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I tried switching the soundcard to each of the PCI slots and the sound still sounds garbled at times. Everything in the bios is set to autoconfigure for the IRQ settings. I checked and my raid controllers are not on the same IRQ as anything else. This mobo only has 4 pci slots and I'm only taking up 2 of them, one with the soundcard and the other with a modem. I tried taking out the modem and just installing the soundcard into each different pci slot but audio results are still fubar.

I once had sound distortion that I traced to the CD-soundcard cable, once I removed that everything worked fine. It's kinda a bodge job fix, but hey, it might work. It was a feature I never used so I lost nothing, but I guess it's still important to quite a few people. Can't hurt to try though!

Thank you all for the suggestions. I guess I'll just live with this compromise. I moved the soundcard to another pci slot and the sound isn't garbled as often, but it still isn't perfect as it should be, and I want to keep my raid setting, so oh well.