mpsan wrote:

I keep seeing this question asked, but have not seen data from persons
who have tried both. I have 2 SATA Maxtor 80GB drives on the Promise
controller running RAID 0. MoBo BIOS is 1014. They run fine, but
people tell me to try the ICH5R and IAA as it is not on the PCI bus
and will run better.

My question is...has anyone confirmed this? Most say to use ICH5R as
it has to be better but have not tried the Promise. I guess I have the
problem the other way around...I am on Promise and wonder about the
ICH5R.

I am using the ICH5R (two WD Raptors as Raid0), and I am quite happy
with it. No, I have not tried the Promise

Simply have a look at the numbers:

Your SATA Maxtor drives have, depending on the exact type, a max
transfer rate of about 55-60 MB/s. Take that x2 for Raid0, and you end
up at about 110-120 MB/s theoretical maximum transfer rate under optimum
conditions.

The PCI bus is limited to 133MB/s. It is used by all the other
components you have there - e.g. sound card, maybe you have a video
editing card there, maybe you're using some other network card than the
onboard CSA controller (e.g. wireless LAN), etc. etc.

If you do not have ANY extra PCI card in use and if you use the onboard
LAN, the Promise controller is OK, because the PCI bandwidth is no
bottleneck for it. But IF you use other PCI cards, you're limiting the
controller transfer rate to whatever is left after you subtract what all
the other cards use up from the 133MB/s limit.

One other things to remember is that I have heard (i.e. I have not
experimented around myself) that the Intel controller has a lower CPU
usage than the Promise one.

To sum up: You probably won't notice much of a difference unless you
have one or more bandwidth hungry PCI cards in your system. If you
haven't, leave everything as it is - but if you ever reinstall your
system, try the Intel controller.