SATA on ICH5R and Nforce4

[David Walsh]

Hi,

My understanding is that the SATA ports on a motherboard equipped with the
Intel ICH5R chipset are faster because they are not limited by the PCI bus.
Do the SATA ports on an Nforce4 motherboard work in a similar way and are
they as fast?

I have an Asus P4P800 board with two 36GB raptors connected. I would like
to get two 74GB raptors to go along side the existing drives but currently I
only have two SATA connectors. I noticed that some Nforce4 boards have four
or more SATA connectors and I would be willing to upgrade by mobo/CPU to
achieve four or more "FAST" SATA connectors (i.e. not limited by PCI bus).

Alternatively, if there's a hardware SATA RAID card out there with four or
more connectors which offsets the PCI bottleneck (compared to direct
southbridge connection) by doing something clever, I would consider this
also.

Thanks and look forward to comments,
D.

 

[Eric Gisin]

The MCH-ICH hub is limited to 266MB/s on the i8XX chipsets, so the two SATA1
ports won't be limited. However, all the IDE+PCI together can saturate it.

The i9XX and nForce4 both have 1+ GB/s interconnects, which are not a
bottleneck unless you use SATA2 port multipliers.

 

[J. Clarke]

Hi,

My understanding is that the SATA ports on a motherboard equipped with the
Intel ICH5R chipset are faster because they are not limited by the PCI
bus. Do the SATA ports on an Nforce4 motherboard work in a similar way and
are they as fast?

I have an Asus P4P800 board with two 36GB raptors connected. I would like
to get two 74GB raptors to go along side the existing drives but currently
I
only have two SATA connectors. I noticed that some Nforce4 boards have
four or more SATA connectors and I would be willing to upgrade by mobo/CPU
to achieve four or more "FAST" SATA connectors (i.e. not limited by PCI
bus).

Nvidia says that their SATA controllers on the nforce4 boards bypass the PCI
bus and go either into a proprietary bus or into a hypertransport link
(they aren't clear on the details). Apparently the same is true for their
onboard gigabit Ethernet. That's the case with their AMD boards--I don't
know what they do with P4.

Alternatively, if there's a hardware SATA RAID card out there with four or
more connectors which offsets the PCI bottleneck (compared to direct
southbridge connection) by doing something clever, I would consider this
also.

The Nforce4 and the current generation of Intel boards have PCI Express,
which has anywhere from somewhat to much higher throughput than PCI. If
you get an SLI board, which has two PCI Express x8 slots, you can plug a
Tekram ARC-1210/1220/1260 4/8/16 port RAID controller into the second x8
slot (video would normally go in the first one) and be running on a 4
GB/sec bus--that's 32 times the bandwidth of 32-bit 33 MHz PCI. Not a
cheap solution--the Tekram controller goes for $500-1300 depending on the
number of ports--but very high performance.