SATA RAID directly connected to southbridge???

[debsteve1]

I have just read an article stating that :- RAID-0 performance is frankly diabolical compared to the hype - without a direct southbridge connection the PCI bus bottlenecks performance. Is this a true statement?. I am starting to build a new pc AMD based and was considering using either the AS-ROCK K7S8XE or a similar speck ABIT board. How can i find out if these boards are dirctly connected to the southbridge?. Can anyone recomend any boards that are directky connected?, please note i am on a budget of approx £60 for the board this could be streched to £100 but that would have to be a "special" board.

Thankyou all for reading. Steve.

 

[Crashman]

First thing is, PCI bus has 133MB/s. Now unless you're running the fastest drives on the fastest controller, that's probably enough to RAID0 two drives. RAID0 can give you around 50% greater drive performance compared to a single drive (even though the peak theoretical increase would be up to 100%). Average data rates on fairly fast drives are still under 80MB/s, so a 50% increase would still be under 120MB/s.

OK but on-southbridge controllers have more potential performance with their own data path to the northbridge. So if you REALLY want to know the difference:

All SATA controller CHIPS you find on motherboards are connected to the southbridge by a PCI bus. These include Highpoint, Promise, and other added in controllers. On-chipset controllers will be listed as such (for example, nVidia RAID, Intel ICH5R RAID, etc.).

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