SATA Raid0 performance degradation

[Stephen Zepp]

About 2.5 years ago I bought an Alienware Area 51 (insert "build your own dammit!" comments here, but wasn't appropriate for me at the time), and it was pretty damned impressive for quite a long time.

Recently however I seem to be really chugging along on apps and games that have extensive disc access...from doing large SVN updates that right to disc, to almost a half to full second system freeze in some games when certain things are apparently being written to a log file, to literally 45-120 seconds of virtual memory swapout for < 2 gig of total memory.

Current info:

Intel 82801FR SATA RAID Controller, 10k rpm drives
Driver Provider: Intel
Driver Date: 3/23/2004
Driver Version: 4.0.0.6211

My question is this: Are there any debugging/troubleshooting tools out there designed to measure/tweak performance for these types of setups specifically? I did -just- realize that my free space has dropped signifigantly) and at 161m free, I'm almost guaranteed that's the issue, but it brings up the need anyway to keep a better eye on performance, so I figured I'd ask the experts out there!

[Morfiend]

List of Benchmark Programs.

I would suggest PCMark, or Sandra, and then use the hard drive analyzer. You could probably find a HD specific analyzer also with a quick search.

[Kitsune]

The performance monitor built into Windows comes with monitors that track memory and hard drive performance, you can fire that up to watch your drive performance while you're doing other stuff.

[Trippy]

Do you have a fixed size swap file or is it dynamic?

You may want to free up some space and defrag the drive.

Also, get a SMART monitoring tool and check to see if your drives are accumulating a lot of errors.