nForce2 Serial ATA onboard - hardware solution or software?

[weedenbc]

I currently have a AMD760-based KG-7 RAID board. I had problems with CPU utilization using the RAID for my boot drive mainly because the onboard RAID chipset (Highpoint 370) isn't a real hardware chipset - it just provided the hardware connectors and did the actual RAID work in software using the CPU. Anyone know if this is the same for the onboard Serial ATA RAID chipset on the nForce2 mobos?

I noticed that when both Tom and Anand did their reviews of the WD Raptor they used an Intel mobo with add-on Silicon Image Sil3112A controller card. That looks to be the same chipset as on the nForce2 boards but I don't see why they didn't show an nForce2 board in that review.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Most likely the RAID functionality for all the SATA chipsets is driven by software, but the ATA controller work is hardware. If you just used it as a regular controller, it'd be the same as if it were just a plain IDE chipset, but if you use RAID, it'll be done in software just like most others.

There really wasn't much need to use more than one type of board for testing it, since it was on the PCI bus controller. If they'd been testing how well different boards might implement the same controller, then they could have used both types. For the most part, the same SATA chip should perform the same on all the boards.