Problem with Highpoint Rocketraid 133 and high cpu usage

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mr A
  • Start date Start date
M

Mr A

I just installed a rocketraid 133 card. I have 2 hd's on it in a
mirrored array and two other hard drives in my system not connected to
the card. When I copy files from a hard drive not on the card to the
hard drives on the card I have excessively high cpu usage, around
90-99%. If I copy files from the raid array to another hard drive, I
still get unusally high cpu usage, but not as high, around 40%. If I
copy files within the array, I have normal cpu usage, somewhere
between 5-15%.

I initially thought that the DMA might not be turned on, but there's
nowhere to turn it on on the RAID card's driver page or the hard
drives page. I updated to the newest bios of the raid card. I also
got the latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers and the raid performance patch. The
RAID's bios shows the hard drives in ATA133 mode. I don't think its a
pci bus problem unless its VIA specific, because I also have a scsi
card w/ hd attached and file transfers to it from a hard drive
connected to my motherboard have normal cpu usage. It's not sharing
an IRQ with any other card. I had been running this system without
the raid card with no problems. Do ide raid cards normally have this
high cpu usage? any idea what could be causing it?
i'm starting to think i flushed $70 down the toilet. :/

here's my pc specs:
Asus A7V8X (VIA KT400) -> Maxtor 80GB IDE & Pioneer DVDR
AMD 1.43 GHz
Highpoint RocketRaid 133-> 2 Maxtor 160GB IDE RAID 1 array
Geforce 2 GTS
Tekram 390U2W SCSI -> IBM 9GB U2W SCSI & Plextor Ultraplex CDROM
SBLive! value
3com 905btx NIC

Any help is appreciated :).
 
How are you measuring cpu usage ?

Some methods, including the Win system meters are just plain wrong.

Very suspicious that copying within the array produces low cpu usage.
 
Hi Mr A,
I too have the same problem.
I have a Highpoint Rocketraid 454 using 3 120GB drives in a raid5
configuration.
Any writes to the drives result in an unusable system due to 99% cpu
usage.

I've removed / disabled most of my devices to try and eliminate an IRQ
/ DMA sharing conflict but the problem persists.

Running Windows XP SP1, latest Highpoint drivers and VIA chipset
drivers. Abit KT7A-RAID

Would appreciate comments/advice from anyone with similar problem
please.

Stan.
 
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