Which is the better SATA controller?

[Stumps]

I am currenty in the process of upgrading from 2x WD1200JB 120GB IDE harddisks to 2x Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250GB SATA Harddisks

This is my first upgrade to SATA..my problem is that my motherboard (GIGABYTE GA-K8NS PRO) has 2 pairs of SATA controllers, the Nforce 3 SATA controller and a Silicon Image 3512 SATA controller...I plan on setting up the Harddisk in a Raid 0(like my old WD1200JB's were on the ITE GigaRaid controller).

Which is the better controller?

 

[Stumps]

anybody?

 

[Stumps]

bump

 

[Arcanedeath]

The Nforce Controler is better due to it being off the PCI bus

 

[stardrek]

You should try benchmarking both. I can't find a direct comparison of the two but you can make some guesses based on a bench done on a PCI card version of the Sil3112 (here: http://www.ocworkbench.com/2003/siliconimage/sil3112/sil3112-1.htm ) and compare it to the 250Gb onboard RAID review (here: http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2004q2/nforce3-250gb/index.x?pg=13 ). A major problem with this is that they use different drives (the Tech Report on uses Raptors!) and all together a seasoned builder would just throw these numbers out the window. But you can get an idea of the possible throughput with the 250Gb.

My best advice is to bench it yourself. I'd like to hear the results you get if you end up doing this. Good luck!

 

[Lord Evermore]

Performance differences are probably negligible. Unlikely to be anything you'd actually notice. The nforce controller has an advantage in throughput because it is not running on the PCI bus, so burst speeds are limited only by the SATA speed, rather than PCI speed, but that is unlikely to actually be anything you could see in usage. Neither one is going to be hitting the limits even in a RAID configuration during sustained transfers.

CPU usage is likely to be a bigger issue, but is still pretty much a non-issue with today's processors. The Tech Report review of the nforce3 showed the CPU usage at 11.4% with an Athlon64 3200+, while the OCW review of the 3112 had 8.3% on an AthlonXP 2700+. So the nforce3 used a higher percentage of a processor that was already running much faster. If you base it on the performance ratings of the processors, the nforce3 used 364.8 "points" while the SI used only 224.1. The SI would be only 7% on the faster processor. Of course this isn't the exact same controller on your board, so that might have changed between models. In either case, a few percentage points is unlikely to seriously affect your experience. Who knows what RAID will do to the CPU usage as well.

The nforce3 also has an advantage in that you don't need any extra drivers installed, if you didn't want to bother with the nvidia drivers and just use the standard Microsoft drivers, because it's just functioning as an integrated IDE controller as far as the OS is concerned.

Of course, you could easily do a performance test yourself. Just install the new drives and test them out, without removing your current configuration.

 

[Stumps]

thanks all...I'm might just bench them to see what is better...but either of them would be an improvement over the ITE GigaRaid controller that I'm using with my 3 year old WD1200JB's.

 

[Stumps]

well after a bit of testing I finally worked out what the better controller is, using HDTACH3 to benchmark both controllers using a pair of Maxtor Diamondmax 10 250gb SATA2 drives setup in raid 0

the NF3 SATA(Possibly SATA2 despite not being mentioned as one in the User manual)RAID scores a whopping 221.3mb/s burst rate with an average read speed of 112mb/s, CPU utilisation is 4%

the Silicon Image sil3512 scores a reasonable 115.5mb/s burst rate with an average read speed of 110mb/s, CPU utilisation is 5%

I would say on average both perform very similar, but I have noticed the NF3 boots a lot faster and can load games a lot quicker the the Sil3512.

 

[stardrek]

Thanks for shareing your results. I'm sure this will come up again some time! Glad you found what was best.

 

[Stumps]

Originally posted by: stardrek
Thanks for shareing your results.

you're welcome

 

[Lord Evermore]

This sounds like they're really neck and neck as far as benchmark performance. The Silicon Image controller is constrained by the PCI bus theoretical speed of 128MBps, so a 115MBps sustained transfer is essentially using 100% of the actual available bandwidth.

The NF3 may have slightly better performance when it's doing really random seeks, this might be why it boots faster and loads games faster.