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Chipset Serial ATA RAID Performance Compared

Intel vs NVIDIA Chipset RAID Performance Investigated

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 12/14/2005 | 09:48 PM ]

Storage technologies have come a long way from Parallel ATA technology in the nineties. Because of cost-efficiency of Serial ATA and the demand for fast and reliable storage, redundant array of independent disks (RAID) is now a wide spread feature even on desktops.<%BANNER[article_nw]%>

The Serial ATA RAID support is included in the majority of today’s chipsets. While built-in RAID controllers were introduced a couple of years ago only the latest generation of Intel’s and NVIDIA’s chipsets support arrays of up to four drives and the RAID 5 mode.

The Tech Report has posted an in-depth head-to-head comparison of Intel’s ICH7R I/O controller and NVIDIA’s nForce4 media and communication processor performance in different RAID modes setups.

“We’ve spent a couple of months running Intel’s ICH7R and NVIDIA’s nForce4 Serial ATA RAID controllers through our exhaustive suite of storage tests, and the results are something to behold. We started with a single drive and worked our way up through RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 0+1, and 5 with two, three, and even four hard drives,” says the author.

“Based on our test results, the nForce4 looks like a superior RAID platform for desktop systems. The nForce4’s performance in the majority of our FC-Test and iPEAK tests is better than that of the ICH7R, and in single-user tests, NVIDIA’s RAID 5 implementation is less crippling than Intel’s. While the nForce4 performs strongly in single-user tasks, it’s easily outclassed by the ICH7R under multi-user loads in IOMeter. We’ve seen NVIDIA RAID controllers hit a wall in IOMeter before, and the nForce4 has real problems scaling array performance beyond 16 outstanding I/Os. The ICH7R, on the other hand, scales beautifully under increasingly heavy loads, and it even doubles the transaction rate of the nForce4 in some cases. This stellar IOMeter performance makes the ICH7R the clear choice for servers and other demanding multi-user environments, even if it’s a slightly less attractive option for desktop systems,” concludes The Tech Report.