Eric Gisin said:
One of the firsts in this review is testing the IDE bandwidth limits in
Intel's ICH5. The Intel marketing BS claims this chip has RAID but it's
purely software.
No they don't. The ICH5R has, the ICH5 has not.
Presumably the ICH5R has a dedicated processor or something else that
helps in performing RAID, unfortunately they don't explain what it is.
And any RAID controller is software driven is some way or other.
The difference is what processor that software (firmware) runs on.
They also say that in addition the ICH5R it needs :
•Intel ® Application Accelerator RAID Edition software
•System BIOS that includes the Intel RAID Technology Option ROM
to complete the RAID capability.
Win 2K/XP's RAID 0 works just as well on the ICH2.
And why wouldn't it? Probably works on a lot of other chipsets too.
I even would expect it to be chipset independant as long as the drivers
are Microsofts.
The ICH5 with two drives has a 80MB/s bottleneck, just like any of the
add-on PCI RAID cards? Why is this?
The HUB is a shared bus, just like PCI is. HUB bus arbitration, perhaps?
The MCH-ICH link is 266MB/s,
Where did you get that from? (Intel don't actually provide direct numbers).
twice that of the old PCI north-south bridge link.
I can only conclude that the ICH internal bus is 133MB/s, just like the
external PCI bus.
They are probably independent buses, as device manager labels them
bus 0 and bus 1.
IINM, the hub is only 8-bit wide. So if independant buses, they still must be
multiplexed.
