ATI's SB450 south bridge is being used by DFI's LANParty RDX200 CF-DR, which we are currently reviewing. All the changes you would like to make regarding RAID setup have to be done within the BIOS since there is no Windows software option. ATI's south bridge supports only the very basic RAID options 0 and 1 with two drives each. Performance-wise, this is the least attractive choice as well; see the benchmark results for details.

ATI Radeon Xpress 200 W/ ULi M1575

The M1575 by ULi Electronics in Taiwan is currently the best south bridge choice for ATI's Radeon Xpress 200 chipset family. The reason for this is ATI being rather late with supplying its own south bridge component - the SB450 is a rather aged model. Thanks to the fact that ATI decided to use PCI Express to interconnect chipset parts, any third party supplier could theoretically be used.

The ULi south bridges support all the common RAID modes, but if you want support for NCQ, 300 MB/s transfers and a RAID 0 with more than two drives, you need the latest M1575. Every change you make to the storage subsystem from within the ULi software requires a system restart, unfortunately.