nForce 2, SATA Raid and Delta 66

S

Sangram

New member
... basically lots of popping, distortion and crackling.

Is anyone using the exact same combo? And if yes, experiencing any pops during playback/recording, specially during disk activity?

I have tried:

1. PCI latency settings in BIOS

2. ACPI/APIC disabled in BIOS

3. Non-overclocked setup

4. Full resintall

5. All drivers and BIOS on the web, in every combination.

The setup is an A7N8X deluxe, onboard SIL controller, 2 x 120 GB maxtors SATA drives, and the Delta 66. The Delta 66 is on a PCI slot where it is only sharing with 1 USB connection (all slots on the mobo share with something - Firewire, USB, RAID, onboard or AGP - that's the five slots).

The problem is absolutely not there when only using my venerable IDE drives. m-Audio support has explained its helplessness and has seemed to point to a full IDE-only setup as the way to go. Maybe I'm hosed, or I need to look at the Intel side of things, if any of you are succesfully running -

1. SATA RAID (Important!!) for the OS, audio programs, etc.

2. A Pro Audio card like a Delta 66

3. Overclocked setup - P4 2.4 or 2.6@3.0 Ghz or more. HT is not that important...

Thank you
 
Sangram,
I am curious, you say that sATA is important for your OS install. My thinking is that I would prefer a simple pATA drive for the OS and applications, with sATA RAID-0 for really fast data access. Because the only thing on the sATA drives is data, they can steam really well. When the OS is also there, you get the data stream being interupted for OS/APP/PageFile access. Not at all sure if this is the problem, but if you have an pldpATA drive hanging around, you should be able to install it as the boot drive and install OS and apps to it, and use the sATA RAID array for pure data, and if it doesn't work, remove the pATA drive and go back to the old setup with no problem. All assuming the MoBo allows for both pATA and sATA drives, and will allow the pATA drive to be primary.
Also, have you tried standard clocking? Sometimes over clocking causes internal communication problems. My feeling there is that RAM and HD speed have a bigger impact than processor speed, so I would go for standard clocking and better stability. For a gamer to crash in the middle of a game just isn't a big deal, while crashing a DAW in the middle of recording a multitrack live set would be a catastrophy!

I have a BioStar SFF machine, and I am looking at going this route, a pair of external sATA drives for the data array, and an internal pATA drive for the OS. I might even try to put two drives inside, with a small one for the swap file and a big one for the OS and Apps. If seperating out the data works, let us know. It will help make my decision to spend big $$$ on external sATA easier ;)

Gordon
 
So what happens if you play music through the onboard audio? I've never really messed with SATA, but maybe check the controller in device manager for PIO being selected not DMA. Not likely but I've seen XP accidently pick PIO mode for IDE devices. If the drives/raid are on PIO, select PIO on purpose, exit device manager, go back in and select "DMA if availibe" once again. Should fix it.
Still, it sounds like a IRQ or DMA conflict. If you're not using the regular printer port and serial ports (not usb), and maybe even the Soundstorm, you could disable that stuff in the bios. Might still have to shuffle pci slots buts it might allow you to get the Delta on it's own IRQ.
 
I'm running a similar setup to yours with a number of differences.
I have a Delta 44 and 2 120GB SATA Barracuda drives, but not in Raid config. I've had no issues yet, all going well so far.

Each drive partitioned is 30+90. OS is on 30GB partition Drive1 and Cakewalk wavs are on 90GB partition drive 2. Then I use Ghost to clone each partition to the other drive so both drives are bootable, audio has its own drive and I have total redundancy.

My mobo is Asus P4P800 with a P4 2.8. It has Raid 0 capability and I did consider Raid but I don't like the idea of losing everything if one drive fries.

I haven't overclocked yet.

My 44 is the only PCI card on the board. SATA controllers, LAN are on the mobo, and AGP graphics. I have wireless kbd & mouse using USB.

As a first step I would get rid of the Raid and see if that makes a difference. If not consider a move up to Intel
 
Thanks for the replies guys.

OK I will try a rinstall but here's the deal. There are pops and crackles whenever the system is reading or writing to disk. Which means that if the Software uses the SATA for Data, it becomes more annoying because the pops and crackles ARE showing up.

When my (smaller) ATA drives are used for data and temp files, there is no popping etc. when I record. Of course during playback since the OS and apps are on the array it pops whenever it loads a track. Specially on older programs. In a new one (I'm playing with Adobe Audition) it's fine both ways, no major issues, except for the fact that it does occasionally 'burp' on playback.

Now I've basically decided what to do. I'm keeping the SATA RAID array on, and I'm picking up 1 or 2 new Seagate Barracuda 120 GB PATA drives so I can boot off a full PATA setup for doing recording (I don't really need much mad speed while tracking).

I can't validate the switch to Intel right now. A friend has a similar setup - though he's not doing audio) and reports very high (50% +) CPU usage when using a RAID 0 setup.

As for my setup, it's wafer-thin. 1394, LPT and COM ports are all off, and the system is standalone without internet access, so no LAN adapters active - all disabled in BIOS. Ditto with MIDI. The onboard sound, curiously enough, has no problems co-existing with the RAID, the popping is only with the Delta. Which now shares with nothing except the PCI SMBus. The system is set up with ACPI disabled. I have to leave Soundstorm on to play my games and to blast during parties.

Cerddwyr: good call. Yes you're right, the data access is faster off the SATA RAID (95 mb/s read/33 mb/s write) but that's the reason the OS is on it - I wanted a superfast PC and it is that now. I will try to move the OS off onto the PATA once my new drives come in. The biggest issue is that the Controller does not get picked up by Ghost. So I can't even image the drives, and a 4-hours reinstall of all data does NOT hold much appeal for me, but I am going to give it all a shot this this weekend, atleast for one or two permutations.

I have already clocked back to default after my power supply gave up the ghost due to intense OC. However the only thing overclocked is the CPU. the nForce chipset locks down the PCI bus, and is anyway rated to 200 MHz (400 DDR) so I was not out of spec even for the PCI bus.

Daffydrunk: Yeah everything not being used is disabled in BIOS I have two IRQs free, even. I'm seeing everything running at UDMA5, and the RAID at UDMA7. So life is normal. And when I play onboard audio, it is peachy. I can be transferring a gig of data or ten, and the audio plays butter-smooth. This is irrespective of whether the transfer is using only SATA, or SATA-PATA, or even SATA-USB for my USB 40 GB 'Keeper' drive. Only while playing audio through the Delta and transfering files (or any disk activity) do I get this wierd popping.

Bulls: Thanks for the advice. Maybe the Maxtor has something to do with it. I need to try trading to the Seagate and check the difference. Your setup is similar to RAID 1, as I can see. Good for safety and if you are keeping data on it, 1 is better than 0. I am not planning to keep audio data on a SATA (or any other kind of) RAID array. The RAID is to ensure my games and applications load fast. For recording plain ATA works better... The P4P800 is a good mobo, but overclocking on Intel is always dicey as you tend to run the PCI bus out of spec. I think the new 865 and 875 chipsets do not have that limitation anymore.

I should really stop all this, go back to my old setup, and start playing a little more..
 
Sangram said:
The biggest issue is that the Controller does not get picked up by Ghost. So I can't even image the drives, and a 4-hours reinstall of all data does NOT hold much appeal for me
Click to expand...

I had the same issue with Ghost 2003. You need to dl the latest updates to get it to work with SATA
 
Sangram said:
... basically lots of popping, distortion and crackling.

Is anyone using the exact same combo? And if yes, experiencing any pops during playback/recording, specially during disk activity?

I have tried:

1. PCI latency settings in BIOS

2. ACPI/APIC disabled in BIOS

3. Non-overclocked setup

4. Full resintall

5. All drivers and BIOS on the web, in every combination.



Thank you
Click to expand...

The most likely help here will be to use a utility such as PowerStrip and change the PCI device priority. Odds are, they are not set up appropriately.

You did not mention what kind of video card you have, and that is a big factor with respect to PCI device priority. Despite being a totally separate bus, AGP cards do have an effect on your ability to properly utilize your PCI bus (primarily due to OS architecture and chipset vendors' inability to force a programmatic paradigm shift). If you have an Nvidia or ATI card, odds are its priority is set at maximum (255). Playing with these settings will quite likely yield very good results for your setup.
 
Marquis:

I heard about powerstrip in this connection earlier. After downloading a (trial) version, I see it has no option to set PCI device priority. Only video settings, refresh rates, that kind of stuff.
I uninstalled it thinking the guy had got the program names confused. But here it is again. So tell me, where do I set PCI device priority in the program? Thanks a ton.

Bulls: Thanks for the heads up on Ghost!
 
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