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Disk concurrency - poor IO in system with multiple HDDs

Hi Experts,

I have a windows XP machine with 4GB RAM, and 4 SATA HDDs installed. I'm shunting some large files (some 1 > GB) and in total ~700GB across a LAN (Restoring a server)

This is ok so far, I'm using robocopy and it seems ok, although the machine slows down quite a bit.

Problem. On other HDD's I get almost no response. It's as though the disk controller is flooded and won't process writes on the other HDDs in the machine which aren't involved in the big transfer.

I want to keep working on my PC but it's almost hung. I've tried installing a PCI sata/ide card and hooking my big transfer drive to this card- thinking that an extra channel might solve the problem but it didn't.

My motherboard is a Gigabyte P965.

I have heard that disk channels are a major factor which differentiates servers from PC's pretending to be servers :)

Thoughts?

travisgish

It could be your network card. Unless it is a high end server card the CPU has to do all the processing. The transfer could be killing your system and bus resources. I had the same problem on my network untill I installed a nice server card in my server.

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Dave Lloyd

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Fred_Nogg

ASKER

Thanks guys for your input. I think we're of the same opinion, I was hoping there might be an easy way to work out what channels/interrupts were being used by which SATA ports, but I think this is simply a hardware limitation of PC based MBs. Also I think the O/S disk scheduling algorithm is a lacking as when there is a big transfer file say 1GB, the other drives pretty much wait for it to finish, where as the read/write on the 2nd HDD could have been interleaved to improve responsiveness.

Yes I used the /IGP option also and found it helped a little with general responsiveness.

Thanks again.