Southbridge Battle: 780a, ICH10 and SB750, Compared
Table of contents
- 1. AMD, Intel, And Nvidia Southbridge Performance Analyzed
- 2. AMD: SB750 Southbridge On The 790FX Chipset
- 3. AMD RAID Creation
- 4. Intel: ICH10R Southbridge On The X58 Express Chipset
- 5. Intel RAID Creation
- 6. Nvidia: 780a SLI MCP Integrated Chipset
- 7. Nvidia RAID Creation And Rebuild
All chipsets today offer integrated Serial ATA (SATA) support, since all mainstream hard drives now utilize the fast serial interface. Even entry-level chipsets tend to support the creation of striped sets (RAID 0) or mirrors (RAID 1) to accelerate storage performance or improve data protection.
Upper-mainstream and high-end products not only offer more SATA ports but also added software-based functionality, such as RAID 5. Although few users actually use RAID 5 on desktop PCs (given a three-drive minimum), this mode requires processing horsepower to calculate parity, which is required to rebuild stored data should one hard drive break. The CPU supplies the horsepower, but the southbridge acts as the controller for the RAID operations, and we found significant differences between RAID 5-enabled desktop chipsets for these tasks.
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Nothing new really... but glad to see the numbers
Erm, you seem to have made a mistake with either your graphs or your text.
Looking at the graphs, the LSI's read access time is 250 to 360us = 0.25 to 0.36ms, whereas your text says, 2.5 to 3.6ms (which would be 2500 to 3600us)
Thanks for an overall good article.
Anyone reading through the delivery will applaud INTEL's ICH 10R and question the recommendation of the LSI MegaRAID SAS9260-8i.
I do not question the ability to stick on a battery that protects data inside the card in case of power loss.... no a UPS would protect data.
Solid State devices are the new kid on the block and not yet MAINSTREAM.
We also find that the LSI MegaRAID SAS9260-8i is a SATA and SCSI device.
(In PART) SATA devices have still to catch up with SCSI devices, so if an entity wants a RAID using MAINSTREAM devices the choice goes to LSI.
I quote..
" LSI’s MegaRAID SAS9260-8i is one of the first SAS/600 cards, although it’s backward-compatible with Serial ATA at 150 and 300 MB/s via SATA Tunelling Protocol (STP). A different article will deal with SAS/600 soon." Unquote
One final question: "Should not the SSD have used SAS/600 ?"