Chipset SATA and RAID performance comparison

• Intel ICH5R
• NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb
• SiS SiS964
• VIA VT8237

Zitat

So there you have it. If I had to pick winners, the ICH5R is an easy choice for top spot for Pentium 4 processors. For the Athlon 64 platform, it's hard to go wrong with the SiS964 for single-drive performance, but for all things RAID, the nForce3 250Gb is clearly the best option. I have no reservations about running the VT8237 on either AMD- and Intel-based platforms, but it's not my first choice for either.

Of course, I would be remiss not to point out how little performance impact different RAID levels had in our application benchmarks and stopwatch tests. Although multi-user and synthetic disk subsystem tests like IOMeter, HD Tach, and ATTO show clear differences between the performance of each RAID implementation and array configuration, the performance benefit in more real world applications is significantly less pronounced. Power users who regularly stress IO performance will no doubt notice a performance benefit moving from a single drive to striped array, but for less demanding users, the redundancy benefits (with no performance loss) associated with a mirrored array may be a better justification for adding a second drive.