Introduction
Having used the AMD raid setup for 6 month, I have discovered the settings that work best for me. I have done comparison graph using hard disk benchmark software before and after the settings. However I will not post any benchmarks here since I dont intend to mess around my perfectly setup system now. This guide is for AMD system only
Prerequisite
- AMD SB700 and SB800 series with Raid support
- Mechanical Harddisk
- AMD Raid Xpert software
- Windows 7
Step
1. Click start menu and type inside the search box – device manager and hit enter. Now expand Disk Drives and double click AMD XXXX SCSI Disk Device
2. You will see the property box and then go to Policies Tab. Please tick ” Turn off windows write-cache buffer on the device”. Doing this your disk is more susceptible for corruption in case of power failure but performance trade-off is huge. I’d say its worth it because I have an off-site backup system.
3. Next, install the AMD Raid Xpert. You can get it from AMD download website.
4. Launch AMD Raid Xpert program and sign in. The default credential is:
Username: admin
Password: admin
5. Now expand Physical Drive View and select your first hard disk. On the right side, choose Settings and please check:
Write cache enabled: Enable
and
NCQ enabled: Disable
Repeat this for all your physical drives.
6. That’s it! Now you can run your own benchmark and see the improvement. I believe that graph will be much more stable and consistent.
Summary
I did not have resource to try this setup on any other machine so it may work differently for you. The only tell sign is to run benchmark right after configuration changes. You may want to do the changes one by one and then running the benchmark to see the changes. Doing so, it will be much easier to undone any mishaps. Share your opinion below.
