SATA RAID-0 Conclusion:
Suffice it to say, the ICH5 RAID
crushes both the onboard Promise controller on the P4C800 Deluxe and the additional Silicon Image controller on the IC7-G with the Raptors in RAID-0. I actually ran HD Tach five times to ensure that the Intel score wasn't a fluke...I got virtually the same results all five times.
If you want the best SATA RAID-0 performance from an onboard/on-chip controller, the Intel ICH5R cannot be beaten. Some of the scores between the three, such as Sandra's File System Benchmark, aren't widely disparate, but the Promise and Silicon Image controllers just couldn't maintain the burst rate and, more importantly, the
consistency and balance of read/write performance offered by Intel's southbridge solution. As you can see in the HD Tach benchmarks, the CPU utilization was higher on the ICH5R, but in my opinion the tremendous increase in burst rate and sustained read/write more than makes up for the 2% or so jump.
One note: the ASUS P4C800 Deluxe features a "vanilla" ICH5, meaning it does NOT have the integrated RAID controller; so, if you want high-end SATA RAID-0 performance, I would avoid the P4C800 until ASUS (hopefully) releases a revision that includes the ICH5R.
EDIT: Prometheus over at Asusboards.com has also done a comparison of the Raptors' RAID-0 performance on the ICH5R, using all the available stripe sizes. It's a good read,
check out his thread here.
And it's official...I hate benchmarking!
