"BaBeL FiSh" said:
Anyone have an opinion on which is the better to use out of Promise or VIA
SATA on the above board?
I am currently using the VIA, and just wondered if the Promise brought about
any better performance.
Thanks.
This is what Via thinks...
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/chipsets/southbridge/vt8237/drivestation.jsp
and here is an independent review:
http://www.gamepc.com/labs/print_content.asp?id=serialcompare
It really depends on which metric you use. On synthetic
tests, the Via can do a bit better. On a file copy test,
the Promise sometimes comes out ahead. Makes it tough to
make a choice.
The one thing we don't know here, is which of the controllers
is more reliable (corrupts array when it shouldn't etc).
Where the controllers really get differentiated, is when they
have a higher bandwidth path to memory. The ICH5R, for example,
has a shared 266MB/sec path to the Northbridge. The PCI bus
is not allowed to bottleneck the RAID in that case.
Possibly the most interesting controllers, will be the ones
that support eight SATA disks, and connect to PCI Express or
PCI-X (133MHz). Some of those are turning in hundreds of MB
per second, which is likely pointless unless you are copying
big files from one array to another.
For example, in this article, an eight port SATA controller
is used to get sustained 500MB/sec read and write on a Mac G5.
http://www.barefeats.com/hard45.html
HTH,
Paul
