In FAT32 we see almost the same situation: Promise controller in WB mode was faster than the rivals in most cases, and HighPoint with 2.34s drivers was very often the last one.

I hope that there are no optimizations yet for FC-test that is why when you decide on a controller for your home system, you could surely use the results we have just discussed. Anyway, there is no more real test yet.

Conclusion

Well, the results we obtained during our comparison of SATA-RAID controllers performance, I can conclude that there is no indisputable leader among them. SiliconImage controller proved very fast in synthetic benchmarks, HighPoint controller showed its best in WinBench (with 2.33s drivers) and Promise (WB) controller performed excellently well in copy tests.

3ware controller was very rarely among the leaders, however, it stayed among the three fastest almost all the time. Of course, we have to reward this stability with the “most balanced drivers award”. By the way, 3ware controller could theoretically perform even better, if the new 7.6 drivers could have come out a bit earlier. Since the tests of RAID controller usually take a lot of time, it always happens that some controller suddenly acquires new drivers. However, unfortunately, we can’t afford to retest the controller in this case, otherwise this process could become eternal...

The confusion with HighPoint controller drivers also caused me a lot of problems, however, now we know with all certainty that 2.33s driver ensures much faster performance of the RocketRAID 1520. And what is the point of 2.34s driver? We are going to find it out later.

I was very pleased with the performance of Intel’s RAID controller. Even though I used a beta version of Intel Application Accelerator, the controller performed very well. The only upsetting thing is that this controller performed best in the tasks that are not supposed to be its major.

Adaptec controller proved quire average, which is probably because of the raw drivers and controller BIOS. I assume that SiliconImage, which chip is used in this controller, didn’t provide Adaptec with proper drivers and BIOS versions in time. And maybe the fast driver simply hasn’t yet passed Adaptec’s validation.

However, there is one thing about Adaptec controller, which we would like to mention separately. It is the BIOS, which boasts the richest set of features and is highly convenient to work with. It is a very rare thing when a low-cost controller features the fully-fledged BIOS of the SCSI RAID product.

And the last thing. Since most controllers of those discussed today were tested on the so-called “first build drivers”, the results should be regarded as preliminary.