ATA controller cards with Silicon Image chips

[Goi]

How are these ATA controller cards compared to Promise or ACARD cards? Any performance/compatibility/stability differences? I just bought an el cheapo ATA133 controller card with the Sil 0680 to replace my onboard ATA33 controller on my Abit BH6, and while I'm noticing a big increase in my DVD-ROM's DAE and my 20GB WD Expert7200 HDD's burst transfer speed, its access time(13ms now compared to 11ms before) and avg transfer speeds seem to have diminished in performance, according to HD Tach 2.61. Of course, the last time I benched was quite a long time ago when my HDD was nowhere as full and I was running Win98 FAT32 instead of Win2K FAT32...would that make such a big difference?

 

[Goi]

Does anyone know anything about this?

 

[Goi]

^bump^

 

[Goi]

Surely someone must know?

 

[Batistuta]

Hi,

I have one of these controllers (2ch. PCI, ATA133, 60$ US), with 2 Maxtor 60GB fluid ATA133 discs in RAID1 on one of the channels.
SiSoftSandra Pro 2002 (not the best bench, I know..) gives a score of 25886 for the RAID discs compared to 26579 for the exact same disc sitting on the primary IDE controller of my Asus P4S533 board. So I'd say perfomance is alright.
It may be another story if you use both channels (because of the limited bandwidth of the PCI 32bit bus).

 

[Goi]

I am indeed using both channels, the primary channel for my WD Expert 7200 20.5GB ATA66 HDD, and the secondary channel for my ASUS 16x/48X DVD-E616 ATA100 DVD-ROM drive. My ATAPI zip drive is on my BH6's secondary IDE channel. It works ok, but only after I solved some IRQ or other hardware conflict with my Santa Cruz...before that I wasn't even able to boot up, getting the blue screen before entering Win2K everytime.

Performance wise, my burst transfers have increased tremendously, much closer to the ATA66 spec of my HDD, but sequential/avg transfers have decreased and become more erratic, as well as a higher access time, according to HD Tach 2.61.