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January 22, 2005
Motherboard RAID chipsets reviewed...
Thanks to Slashdot for this link: Chipset Serial ATA and RAID performance comparison - The Tech Report - Page 1 One month testing of the four major motherboard chipsets for SATA RAID. Awesome. My Asus MB has both the NVidia Nforce3 AND the Silicon Image x2 chip set. The SIS does good in all areas with the exception of CPU Utilization where it is 10-15X worse than the other chipsets. That may be the reason that other reviewers have complained about the SIS RAID controller going hinky when you overclock the CPU (some conflict). But makes me glad that I got a powerful AMD 64 3200, maybe more powerful than a normal file server would have. Also, the Hyperthreading on the Intel chips SIGNIFIGANTLY reduced CPU utilization for chipsets on that platform versus AMD, so there is probably an advantage to using Pentium for a file server. My next box will be Pentium. Here are some snippets: Or you can go straight to Conclusions...
"With a single drive, the SiS964 is king in HD Tach's read speed tests. The SiS964 can't match the maximum read speeds of the nForce3 250Gb and ICH5R, but SiS is out ahead when it comes to minimum and average read speeds."
"The SiS964 maintains its lead as we move to mirrored RAID 1 arrays. This time around, Intel's ICH5R turns in a strong average read speed performance to distance itself from the field and secure second place."
Switching from mirroring to striping, the SiS964's average and minimum read speeds continue to lead the field. Average read speeds are considerably more varied with RAID 0, and VIA's VT8237 turns in a strong performance on both our Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 platforms.
RAID 0 burst speeds spreads the field considerably. Here, the nForce3 250Gb is way out ahead of the competition, distantly followed by the SiS964. Both VT8237 implementations are off the pace, but they're not as slow as the ICH5R, which may be constrained by limited chipset bandwidth.
With RAID 0, the VT8237 finally manages to beat the nForce3 250Gb on the AMD side of things. The SiS964's CPU utilization with striped arrays is particularly high, especially when compared with the other Athlon 64 chipsets. Wow. The SiS964 has some very real CPU utilization issues with RAID 0. Over 20% CPU utilization is simply unacceptable when the rest of the pack is under 2%. But the big story is still the SiS964's RAID 0 CPU utilization, which tops 30% with the web server test pattern.
Our single-drive web server results mirror what we saw with the file server test pattern. Again, the nForce3 250Gb has real problems with single-drive performance scaling under increasing loads.
The SiS964 makes its mark in the Multimedia Content Creation Winstone and lays waste to the Athlon 64 field across the board. The ICH5R is out on top again on the Intel side, too, all the way from single drives to RAID 0 arrays.
My conclusions: Don't use the Silicon Image for RAID 0. I am going to test it for RAID 5 and tell ya. nForce3 looks promissing in the 4 controller configuration (if I can find a MB that uses it with its speedy interconnect). If you just want tried and true, stick with the ICH5R.
Posted by Martin at January 22, 2005 9:07 PM
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