Intel 845 DDR Motherboard Roundup - December 2001

IDE RAID Performance

Out of the 12 boards featured in this roundup, four of them had support for IDE RAID. Of those four, there were only two types of IDE RAID controllers used, both of which were ATA-133 compliant. The Gigabyte and MSI boards used a Promise controller while the ABIT and Soyo boards featured a HighPoint controller.

To benchmark their performance we constructed a 2 drive RAID 0 array using Maxtor 7200RPM ATA-133 80GB drives. The stripe size used was 64KB and the total array size was 160GB.

IDE RAID 0 Performance Disk Winbench 99 (Transfer Rate in MB/s) MSI 845 Ultra Gigabyte P4 Titan DDR Soyo P4I Fire Dragon ABIT BD7-RAID 74.5 74.1 56.5 56.3 | 0 | 15 | 30 | 45 | 60 | 75 | 89

Here we can clearly see that the Promise controller offers higher peak theoretical performance than the HighPoint controller that both ABIT and Soyo use. It's also clear that ATA-133 isn't necessary for even a two drive RAID 0 array where the transfer rate never peaked above 85MB/s on the Gigabyte/MSI boards.

IDE RAID 0 Performance High End Disk Winmark 99 (Transfer Rate in MB/s) ABIT BD7-RAID MSI 845 Ultra Gigabyte P4 Titan DDR Soyo P4I Fire Dragon 31.8 31.7 31.4 31 | 0 | 6 | 13 | 19 | 25 | 32 | 38

In the High End Disk Winmark tests we see that there is no real performance difference between the controllers.

IDE RAID 0 Performance Disk Winbench 99 (CPU Usage - lower is better) MSI 845 Ultra ABIT BD7-RAID Soyo P4I Fire Dragon Gigabyte P4 Titan DDR 1.85 2.02 2.36 2.49 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 0

...at the same time, there are no significant differences in CPU utilization either.