Serial ATA RAID

The Serial ATA RAID controller of the ATI SB450 South Bridge doesn’t boast the same attractive features as the controller of the NVIDIA nForce4. But is it really so in real applications?

In order to make the final conclusion about the Serial ATA controller performance, we used the Futuremark PCMark05 testing suite. The measurements were made for RAID 0 array built from Western Digital Raptor WD360GD HDDs. Besides the results obtained for the chipset Serial ATA RAID controllers of the testing participants, we have also added the results obtained for the Silicon Image SiI3114 controller integrated onto the DFI LanParty UT RDX200 CF-DR mainboard.

And again the nForce4 based mainboard beats our hero. This chipset works faster with hard disk drives than the Serial ATA controller of the ATI SB450 South Bridge. Even the integrated Silicon Image SiI3114 PCI controller doesn’t help DFI LanParty UT RDX200 CF-DR: its results are even worse than those of the chipset one.