Fasttrak crackling noise continued: Unexpected discovery...

[Ghydda]

Hey Dr. M and everybody else who is interested.

And I must say that I'm now more puzzled than ever.

First a little story to sum up the events at hand:

I finaly found the cash to buy the bleeding drives (2x30GB Maxtor 40+).

After modifying the Promise, I hooked the drives up, created a RAID0 array, bootet into Win2k and partitioned/formated the new drive (NTFS-partition).

Then I began capturing to see if I now would get the infamous crackling noise. And I did. So now I have joined the club. Hip-hurray...

Turning down the utilization slider in the Promise conf. program reduced somewhat on the prob. but it is still there.

Then I decided to replace my SBLive with my old and trusty SB32 (it has been decommisioned for some time). Booted into Win2k, loaded drives -> all fine. Began capture to IDE-RAID. Still crackling noise...! And again the slider can inc/dec the amount of crackling noise.

Very wierd, considering the recommended solution to the crackling issue was to use ISA-based sound cards...

When ever capturing to SCSI I get perf. sound quality, regardless PCI/ISA soundcard.

I have not tried anything in Win98 yet.

And on a sidenote: Performance is NOT what it should be with my IDE-RAID. Something is terribly wrong. The best benchmark i can get is 30-something MB pr sec. And this is very inconsistently. When moving data back and forth between my SCSI setup and the Promise setup, transferrate is useally between 5-10 MB pr. sec. NOT right, right?!!? Total CPU utilization is lov, 15% when doing this.

I think the problem in my particular case lies with the Promise cont. Regardless of the situations (games/rendering/capturing/etc) speed is not up to par whenever the Promise is involved.

I hope you could have some additional info to throw this way. Things I should try out. I just would like to point out that Win98 is not the most stable thing to run on my machine (configuration problems/lockups), so any test would be grately appriciated if they could be done from Win2k. However, if Win98 is required, then I will comply.

Hope to hear some new theories and possibly solutions to the infamous crackling noise issue.

Ghydda


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2+2=5 - but only for extremly large values of 2.

[Dr Mordrid]

"After modifying the Promise, I hooked the drives up, created a RAID0 array, bootet into Win2k and partitioned/formated the new drive (NTFS-partition)."

Does this mean you're using a modified Ultra66 controller? If so you got what you paid for.

Also it sounds like you have quite a PCI bus loading and you also state that lowering the PCI utilization slider in Ultratune does have an effect. Have you tried using a custom profile with all non-essential PCI resources disabled? Such profiles are recommended by most viddo HW & SW makers.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 07 July 2000).]

[Ghydda]

Hi Dr. M

Isn't everybody using the Fasttrak hack?

I've gonna give the profiles thing a try, no better yet, I will flip all PCI cards out but the Promise cont. and see how it goes (and using the SB32 for sound). I'm not optimistic though.

Would you agree it SHOULD NOT make any difference wether or not there's IRQ sharing inside Win2k running in ACPI-mode?

Well, I'm off. I shall spend the entire weekend kicking and screaming over my nogood hardware while testing various configurations.

Cya

Ghydda

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2+2=5 - but only for extremly large values of 2.

[Dr Mordrid]

IRQ sharing between video components and driver controllers is usually notsogood. I don't know about how this works in Win2K as I'm not using it yet. Mebbe when SP2 comes out....

Dr. Mordrid

[Enrico Ng]

I have a fast trak66 and have the same problem
I'm planning on getting an awe64 to solve the problem.

if I go to win98, and disable my other cards (network, sblive, scsi) does that mean that the other cards wont affect my raid card?
will it the same as physically pulling the cards out of my box?

I want to keep my pci bus clear from "distractions"

also, when my computer boots up my cards on on different IRQs (right before the os starts) in w98 when I look at the IRQs, its correct, in w2k, it isnt. it says that most of my devices are on IRQ9, etc.
is w2k changing my cards to different IRQs?

[Dr Mordrid]

Disabling the unused PCI cards in a user profile is enough. That way the drivers won't even be loaded. They will, however, continue to draw power and thus will not solve any power related problems.

Dr. Mordrid

[Enrico Ng]

I dont have any power problems (I dont think) its just the bus noise thing. I found a SB16 ISA, I think I'll give that a try first. I hope it I can get decent audio.

[fatfish]

Hi guys,

I do have the problem with my Mod Ultra66.
I tried everything and still not work.
Until I reformat the array using 1 kb.
It seem to work now.
Would U guys try it.

Hope this can be help.

James

[TommyS]

Hi fatfish,
Your solution is fine, was the only one i found(set stripe block size from 1 to 4K) one year ago with fasttrak33 (before the change of Mobo/Cpu), but with 1k (or 4K) setting you lose all performance improve that Promise raid should give!
I suggest to change mother board if you own one with "Via" chipset, i own a Asus P2B-F since june-99 and i can use my orig. Fastrak33 and my modified ultra66->fasttrak66 without any problem and with 5 PCI, 1 AGP and 1 Isa board.
see: http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum2/HTML/004237.html http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum2/HTML/003303.html
Ciao

[Enrico Ng]

I just installed a SB16 into my computer
I reinstalled win98, disabled my network, sblive, scsi cards, and left my raid, dispay and sb16 card enabled. The card are still plugged in, just disabled. I lowered the pci utilization to the lowest level, and I STILL have the same problem.
it is a bit better, but its the crackling sound is still there.
is there anything else I can do?
I asumme getting a awe64 to replace my sb16 wont help

[Absolutt]

Hmm.. maybe it's the drives,
Maxtor 40+ drives are KNOWN to have big big problems with the Fastrakk setup.. mainly showing up as very poor transfer rates, as well as a "sawtooth" pattern showing up in the transfer rates if doing a benchmark in ATTO or HD tack. This has been beaten to death in the Storagereview.com forum, I'd suggest looking at the faq there for any possible solutions.. I hope that helps in some way.

[Dr Mordrid]

Hmmmm...

I have used three Maxtor Plus 40's in a RAID0 on both a Fasttrak66 and a Fasttrak100. This array delivers a consistant 48-52 mb/s sequential writes in SANDRA. It is routinely used for captures to raw RGB, which uses up almost 30 mb/s, with no problems at all.

A single Plus 40 mounted to either Fasttrak as a JBOD array shows the 20+ mb/s typical for this drive and it can capture at rates very close to its benchmark. This is also indicative of no significant throughput excursions.

In fact the only excursions I've seen during ACTUAL captures have been due to the source (bright flashes etc.). This is very common with codecs like MJPeg that have no built-in data rate control.

Dr. Mordrid

[Absolutt]

Dr.. I think you're one of the few that got lucky. I can't speak for the drives however as I don't have one or more, but the problem was proliferant enough to make storagereview's FAQ as a known problem. Maybe they fixed this. Or.. my stab at the problem would be invalidated if someone could reproduce it on a non Maxtor +40 setup.
Would be interesting to see.

[Pertti]

Absolutt,

The Maxtor drives have been configured to verify everything that is written on them during the first 10 start-up/Power-down period.
That is the reason for the sawtooth pattern.

You can download a utility from Mactor site to change this.

Pertti

[Dr Mordrid]

Duh...I flat forgot to mention that in my posts. Sorry 'bout that. The direct link is;

http://www.maxtor.com/downloads/pub/main/setwrtvr.exe

As Pertti says once this "burn in" is finished they run without the confirmation cycle.

There is also a utility for changing the new DiamondMax 60 5,400 rpm drives to ATA100 operation;

http://www.maxtor.com/downloads/pub/main/66to100.exe

and a new Maxtor drive series: the DiamondMax Plus 45. These are Maxtor's ATA100 7,200 rpm drives.

I can't wait to get a pair on my Fasttrak100.

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 21 July 2000).]