Six Serial ATA/150 Controllers Compared

zerodamage · Jan 2, 2004, 08:18 PM

"While Serial ATA/150 RAID capabilities are now thought of as a standard feature on new motherboards, many fall under the assumptions that all RAID controllers will perform similar to each other. This is likely due to the fact that other "standard" motherboard features like Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, and Firewire will show very little real-world performance difference over different controllers and chipsets. Serial ATA/150 RAID, on the other hand, still has a huge amount of performance variance between different controllers. Choosing the wrong drive for the wrong controller may suppress performance and not allow you to feel the smoothness one would expect from a nice Serial ATA/150 RAID setup.

Just a few weeks ago here at GamePC, we looked at a new LSI Logic Serial ATA/150 RAID adapter with a fleet of Western Digital Raptor 74GB hard drives. While this adapter was nice enough for showing off the potential for RAID arrays with four or more disks along with high-end RAID levels, it's certainly not the controller that most people are going to use with their shiny new Serial ATA/150 hard drives. The vast, vast majority of people who buy a couple of new Serial ATA/150 hard disks are just going to use the RAID abilities of their new motherboards. Thus, the question we were asked quite a lot after that lab report was, "How will these Raptor drives perform with regular old onboard Serial ATA/150 RAID controllers?" "

Source: Gamepc.com

Jan 2, 2004, 08:18 PM	#1
zerodamage HardwareHeaven Extreme Member Join Date: May 2003 Location: Virginia, USA Posts: 3,478 Rep Power: 0 System Specs	Six Serial ATA/150 Controllers Compared "While Serial ATA/150 RAID capabilities are now thought of as a standard feature on new motherboards, many fall under the assumptions that all RAID controllers will perform similar to each other. This is likely due to the fact that other "standard" motherboard features like Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, and Firewire will show very little real-world performance difference over different controllers and chipsets. Serial ATA/150 RAID, on the other hand, still has a huge amount of performance variance between different controllers. Choosing the wrong drive for the wrong controller may suppress performance and not allow you to feel the smoothness one would expect from a nice Serial ATA/150 RAID setup. Just a few weeks ago here at GamePC, we looked at a new LSI Logic Serial ATA/150 RAID adapter with a fleet of Western Digital Raptor 74GB hard drives. While this adapter was nice enough for showing off the potential for RAID arrays with four or more disks along with high-end RAID levels, it's certainly not the controller that most people are going to use with their shiny new Serial ATA/150 hard drives. The vast, vast majority of people who buy a couple of new Serial ATA/150 hard disks are just going to use the RAID abilities of their new motherboards. Thus, the question we were asked quite a lot after that lab report was, "How will these Raptor drives perform with regular old onboard Serial ATA/150 RAID controllers?" " Source: Gamepc.com