ML 330 VERY VERY SLOW.....IDE IS ONLY THING THAT MAKES THIS UNIT STAND OUT

[James Smith_18]

I have a ML330 With the IDE Raid 1 Setup.... It's one of 4 ML330 I manage....

OS is WIN2003 Enterprise Edition....
Server is a Domain controller DNS and Exchange...

system has 1.5 gig on memory and only loads up about 900 meg of it ...it has never used more than .1.1 gig ...

I have run the compaq windows diagnostics and it found nothing wrong..... Event viewer also finds nothing wrong......

system is very stable but takes 30-40 seconds to open any window.....and what ever I do it's just plain slow......painfully.....

It seems to take forever to read and right to the disc .... does this sound familliar to any one?

Thanks

James

[Tarek Kawach]

Hi James:

There is alot of causes to this issue; possible we can make sure firmware is uptodate on that server, and also the driver for the ATA controller.

also From MS there is a lot of fixes. Here is some of them:

FIX 1: Microsoft provided a tool called DSKCache.exe which is supposed to automagically set a registry value CacheIsPowerProtected=1 for the physical disks and suppresse all FUA requests. If the fix works you see "Power Protect" field change from disabled to enabled.

FIX 2: Then Microsoft provided yet another hotfix Q332023_W2K_SP4_X86_EN.exe.

FIX 3: Windows 2003 has this feature built into the device manager. Right click on a disk under "disk drives" choose properties then policies. Select checkbox labeled Advanced Performance.

Slow Disk Performance When Write Caching Is Enabled http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;332023

Obtain the Dskcache.exe Tool to Configure the "Power Protected" Write Cache Option
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;811392

HOW TO: Use the SQLIOStress Utility to Stress a Disk Subsystem Such As SQL Server
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;231619


Not sure if you are using ML330 G1,G2 or G3
- but this is an entery level server and for Exchange you really should be using SCSI and SCSI RAID Controller with read/write cache. ATA is too slow for what you are using this server for; and depends on your Exchange DATABASE.

See Attached Documents.

Hope all this info will help.

Best regards,

Tarek.