P4C800E Deluxe Intel SATA RAID vs. Promise SATA RAID

I keep seeing this question asked, but have not seen data from persons
who have tried both. I have 2 SATA Maxtor 80GB drives on the Promise
controller running RAID 0. MoBo BIOS is 1014. They run fine, but
people tell me to try the ICH5R and IAA as it is not on the PCI bus
and will run better.

My question is...has anyone confirmed this? Most say to use ICH5R as
it has to be better but have not tried the Promise. I guess I have the
problem the other way around...I am on Promise and wonder about the
ICH5R.

TIA

 

I am using the ICH5R (two WD Raptors as Raid0), and I am quite happy
with it. No, I have not tried the Promise

Simply have a look at the numbers:

Your SATA Maxtor drives have, depending on the exact type, a max
transfer rate of about 55-60 MB/s. Take that x2 for Raid0, and you end
up at about 110-120 MB/s theoretical maximum transfer rate under optimum
conditions.

The PCI bus is limited to 133MB/s. It is used by all the other
components you have there - e.g. sound card, maybe you have a video
editing card there, maybe you're using some other network card than the
onboard CSA controller (e.g. wireless LAN), etc. etc.

If you do not have ANY extra PCI card in use and if you use the onboard
LAN, the Promise controller is OK, because the PCI bandwidth is no
bottleneck for it. But IF you use other PCI cards, you're limiting the
controller transfer rate to whatever is left after you subtract what all
the other cards use up from the 133MB/s limit.

One other things to remember is that I have heard (i.e. I have not
experimented around myself) that the Intel controller has a lower CPU
usage than the Promise one.

To sum up: You probably won't notice much of a difference unless you
have one or more bandwidth hungry PCI cards in your system. If you
haven't, leave everything as it is - but if you ever reinstall your
system, try the Intel controller.

 

Heres a review of some southbridge raid controllers.

http://www.tbreak.com/reviews/article.php?id=291

 

Nice link. Pretty much the same benchmark I have in my p4p800, although I
don't use raid, only single sata. I can testify that the cpu taxation of the
ich5r on sata is only 2%, I recently got that result using hd tach, while
the pata had 1%, so they perform basically the same since this difference
falls between the test's measurement error.

 

Thank you Bob.

I have a dvd-ROM on Primary Master and a LiteON CD-RW on Secondary
Master. Is it true that with the ICH5R you loose the Secondary onboard
IDE Port? That would make my CD-RW go away.

 

Very good tests. The ICH5R is not bad.

(Courseyauto) wrote in

 

You will loose one ide port if you use sata & win9x or winnt. Not the case
on w2k/xp, on which you'll be able to use both ide channels & sata together

 

Yup, saw that in the manual...May try to put RAID0 on ICH5R. I have a
64k stripe size now on the Promise.

 

Yup, saw that in the manual...May try to put RAID0 on ICH5R. I have a
64k stripe size now on the Promise.

You dont have to use raid on the sata,but you do have to use a raid driver
for the sata drive to be recognized. If you want only one sata drive on the
ICH5R controller,you dont have to create a raid array but you do have to hit F6
when installing the OS and install the raid driver.
If you do it like that you will still have use of all your IDE ports.

DOUG

 

Doug, I do use RAID0 with the 2 SATA's on my Promise. I just said I
could not add a non-raid PATA drive to my Promise as a 3rd drive.

Also the loss of an IDE port was NOT in XP...I did not read far enough
in the manual.



(Courseyauto) wrote in

 

Doug, I do use RAID0 with the 2 SATA's on my Promise. I just said I

I think you can still use the promise raid controller as an IDE drive
controller,buyou still have to turn on the promise raid controller and set it
fot ATA in the bios. DOUG

 

Well, I did do that...no luck.

(Courseyauto) wrote in