Southbridge Battle: 780a, ICH10 and SB750, Compared

Benchmark Results: Read/Write Throughput

Effective read throughput varies greatly. In RAID 0, Intel dominates at more than 600 MB/s minimum throughput, which is close to the interface maximum. LSI’s controller follows at 474 MB/s minimum. AMD strolls along at 191 to 230 MB/s, Nvidia manages 178 to 194 MB/s. You won’t need six super-expensive SSDs to reach this performance; three conventional $70 hard drives will probably provide the same throughput. The results are similar in RAID 5, and numbers decrease a bit more if you work from a degraded array.

Don’t try copying large amounts of data onto a degraded RAID array. They all deliver poor performance while rebuilding parity information on the fly. While Intel’s ICH10R is the only storage controller to deliver really fast write throughput, LSI’s new SAS 9260-8i card wins the throughput tests thanks to high and sustainable performance.