Conclusion

Our benchmark results indicate that SiI3124 controller is a worthy successor to the good old buddy – SiI3114. The controller uses up the hard disk drive speed potential to the full extent thus achieving extremely high linear read and write speeds. This way, it is the HDDs that limit the arrays performance, and not the controller.

No doubt that the new controller with 133MHz PCI-X bus support can challenge any of the current SATA II drives.

The controller demonstrated surprisingly even (without any unexpected drops in individual tests) high performance and excellent scalability of the results depending on the number of hard disk drives in an array. But just like in case of SiI3114 controller, all this is true only for RAID 0 arrays. Mirrored arrays built with SiI3124 controller can only be worth it if you are aiming at increasing the data storage security, since we revealed no performance increase in any of these modes.

In fact, it has already become a typical feature of Silicon Image reference BIOS and driver versions that they do not contain any optimizations for mirrored arrays. So, we are still looking forward to our benchmarks of the third-party controller cards based on SiI3124 chip from Silicon Image.

Right now you can download drivers for Windows NT/2000/XP and 2003 Server from the manufacturer’s official web-site.