slow write performance

[Ayman Altounji]

have 3200 installed in (asus p2b-ds) dual pentium (100mhz fsb) board. no problems booting or indicated in diagnostic utility. read performance ok, but write speed only around 2 mb/sec with compaq 18 or 36 gb 10k hdd?s.

[Ayman Altounji]

How are the batteries on the controller ? If these are flat, then the write-cache will be disabled, and you'll take a hit on performance.

Also, check that write-cache is enabled for the array in the first place - its possible to set it to read-only.

[Ayman Altounji]

your reply is very logical (as one would expect), and under normal circumstances one would immediately rush to the computer to follow up on your suggestions. unfortunately, however, i managed to get hold of a rather antiquated proliant 1500 in which i installed the smart-3200. to my surprise it performed excellently returning a write speed around 8 mb/sec in spite of the single 100 mhz cpu.
re-installing the controller in 2 different non-compaq boards again resulted in 2 mb/sec write performance. seems that the only alternative -albeit an expensive one- is to find a compaq server board with one (or better still two) processor(s) that will do the raid controller justice.
thank you for the effort; will let you know if i can learn some more about this problem.