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LOSTCIRCUITS		SHORTCUTS: 6.4 GB and Now What? Separating the DMAs Solving Speed Issues Performance Acceleration Technology A few new Silicons Bonanza Test Setup Memory Performance RAID performance I RAID performance II Winstones 3D Gaming OpenGL / CAD Conclusion Your comments? Intel Mainboards Online
Intel i875 - Canterwood    SATA and GbE for PAT
(Review by MS, April 14, 2003)

The worst bottleneck in today's personal and enterprise computers is the mass storage interface. Parallel ATA, even in its latest incarnations is an anachronism and even if we have to wear the hat of an iconoclast for the sake of a good purpose, UATA-133 is as dead as any of its precursors in view of the new SATA technology. Keep in mind that, so far, SATA was hampered by the lack of integrated support. Keep in mind also that SATA abides by different rules than Parallel ATA, especially when it comes to RAID and the default settings for the stripe size.

What I am getting at is the fact that the ICH5 is probably a more significant contribution to the overall Canterwood chipset than PAT or LOUIS, er, make that JAN for DDR400 (for the uninaugurated, never mind these names, they are Intel-internal). Integrating SATA into the ICH overcomes the limitations of the PCI bus and literally unfetters SATA RAID as we'll show in the benchmarks below. Briefly, we took one Barracuda ATA-V (parallel) and compared it against the same model using a serial interface, two Barracuda SATA-V in RAID O and two Barracuda 7 (SATA) in RAID 0. We changed the stripe size from 128 to 16k for comparison purposes with both the Cuda-V and the Cuda-7 and the results were interesting to say the least.

For basic evaluation of drive performance, we used SiSoft Sandra File Index. HDTach and a variety of other drive benchmarks are no longer capable of accurately measuring HD performance and after spending some 2 months looking at HDD benchmarks, SiSoft Sandra turns out to be the one most reliable and accurate benchmark as long as Random R/W and Access time are discarded.

RAID 0 cofiguration using two Seagate Barracuda 7. The performance shown here puts any single high-end SCSI drive to shame and may be the first nail in the coffin for SCSI as we know it.

Let's take a look at the different I/O storage configurations:

From single Parallel ATA Barracuda V over SATA and SATA RAID using Barracuda V and Barracuda 7 in stripe size of 16 or 128k. The overall "score" does not mean too much, we'll have the details next.

next page:    => I/O performance Cont. =>