ULi M1575 for ATI Crossfire – SATA2 and Fast USB for the ATI Chipset

Disk Controller Performance

With so many chipsets and brands of storage controllers on current Athlon 64 boards, we standardized on Anand’s storage benchmark, first described in Q2 2004 Desktop Hard Drive Comparison: WD Raptor vs the World, as a standard means of measuring disk controller performance. To refresh your memory, the iPeak test was designed to measure "pure" hard disk performance, and in this case we kept the hard drive as consistent as possible while varying the hard drive controller. The idea is to measure the performance of a hard drive controller with a consistent hard drive. We played back Anand’s raw files that recorded I/O operations when running a real world benchmark - the entire Winstone 2004 suite. Intel's IPEAK utility was then used to play back the trace of all the IO operations that take place during a single run of Business Winstone 2004 and MCC Winstone 2004. To try to isolate performance difference to the controllers we were testing, we used Seagate 7200.7 model SATA and IDE hard drives for all tests.

iPeak gives a mean service time in milliseconds; in other words, the average time that each drive took to fulfill each IO operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of IO operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance. This number should not be used to report hard disk performance as it is just the number of IO operations completed in a second. However, the scores are useful for comparing “pure” performance of the storage controllers in this case.

The ULi M1575 is an even better performer than the already excellent ULi M1573. The SATA2 implementation definitely improves performance in both Business and Content Creation iPeak tests. In fact, our iPeak results show the ULi significantly outperforming NVIDIA SATA2, and in the same league as the well-regarded Silicon Image 3132 discrete SATA2 solution. The current ATI SB450 is also an excellent competitor in our iPeak benchmarks, and will satisfy most any end user in IDE and SATA performance.

In past benchmarking, IDE has provided the slowest IO performance in this roundup. However, ULi and ATI IDE break that trend, with IDE performance being the best that we have measured since we have been testing with iPeak.

There are no additional SATA/SATA2 controllers on the ULi M1575 Reference Board, but with excellent IDE and SATA2 disk performance, there is really no need for additional discrete controllers unless you need more than four SATA2 drives.