Dom

SerialATA Interface stalks along as if it were the second-year soldier. The rime of press-releases has come to an end and real controller cards from numerous manufacturers have already got to the stores. In order to help you find your way in this diverse variety of SATA RAID controllers, we decided to undertake a brief express-testing.

Of course, among our testing participants will be the solutions from Promise and HighPoint. Could you image a roundup without them? Of course not!

However, now there are quite many newcomers in this market. Take Intel Company, for instance. They integrated a RAID controller into their chipset South Bridge. This innocent prank at first glance, can change the situation in the low-cost RAID controllers market really drastically. First, since RAID controller is integrated into the chipset, the necessity to buy an external RAID solution will not be evident for the user: he already has one controller, why buy another one?

Secondly, Intel is not going to remain the only developer and manufacturer of chipsets equipped with an integrated RAID controller. Very soon all chipset guys will be ready to boast the same cool feature. As a result, the prices of external add-on RAID controller cards will crash and the products will either disappear or will be pushed to a more expensive market segment, which is currently occupied SCSI RAID controllers for workstations. All in all, hard times are coming...

Read the whole review at XBitLabs.com