The Southbridge Battle: nforce 6 MCP vs. ICH7 vs. ICH8

[enewmen]

I'll be happy with the p965 if I can upgrade to yorksfield later.

 

[leexgx]

still an little confused with the results (and the resluts i am getting now on my 4x raid setup)

when i First installed XP on my 4xMaxtor 80gb RAID 0 setup on an Nvidia AMD X2 3800 + cpu and 590 chpset

i was getting With HD tach the speed of 4 Disks about 280-250MB/s as well as the Burst speed been high 200MB/s i even have screen shots of them

but now i get the not so fast speeds of 115MB/s max (4 or 2 disk) and the only thing i can think it is i now i am useing Seagates insted of Maxtors ? or maybe an bios update ?

-------------------------------------------
just found out that my segates was set to 150 limit not 300 limit on the back of the segate drive
now get speeds of 140mb But the HD tach line is Not strate its jumping around 130-150MB/s all the way mite be the disks are fighting for bandwith ? i going to order 4 x 80 gb Diamond 10 disks for monday and see if i can get my high speed disk array back i post my pics that i got soon as i find an place to upload them to
-------------------------------------------

 

[JohannesK]

About the 110/120MB/s Limit on Nvidia Chipset
goto XP Devicemanager and Disable Readcache on the SataBus. After this i got Hdtach Average Read 144MB/s with 2 Raptor 150 Raid 0

 

[TheGreatOne]

I'll be happy with the p965 if I can upgrade to yorksfield later.

Just found out that the ICH9 is "sampling", so it will not be long till full production.

Seems like the ICH8 and 965 family is going to be very short lived.


Tim

 

[Whizzard9992]

I'm a little dissapointed in this article.

Very simply:

1) The article seems biased towards the 680i. The 680i trails behind the 965P in just about every benchmark, northbridge and south. Anyone purusing the forums will tell you that the 680i is plagued with problems and is a pain to OC. most high-end 965P motherboards match the 680i feature-for-feature, other than chaining the two Gig-E ports.

2) There seems to be an obvious bottleneck with the nVidia RAID. Did they contact nVidia about this?

Otherwise, it was an interesting read.

 

[yakumoklesk]

I'll be happy with the p965 if I can upgrade to yorksfield later.

Just found out that the ICH9 is "sampling", so it will not be long till full production.

Seems like the ICH8 and 965 family is going to be very short lived.


Tim

Is there any info about ICH9? I wonder what improvements/additions will have with respect to ICH8. I was targetting for an Asus Striker Extreme (680i), but thinking in the low probability that I will use SLI I am now doubting. For now I have the microprocessor in a box, an E6600.
Any idea of production date?

Thanks.

 

[Fungalberry]

OK, im new with the whole raid thing... all i know is raid 0 is fast but risky(data loss) and that raid 1 is secure(data mirror).
So say im setting up a gaming pc, 2x250gb WD, HD in raid 0
what would be the best size for array?

I'm use RAID 0 unless you have some insanely important info on there. You could always back important stuff up on another hard drive or computer or something. Or if you don't want to do any of those, you could just scrap RAID and use two hard drives. Nothing wrong with that, 'cept a very small loss in speed.

 

[enewmen]

I'll be happy with the p965 if I can upgrade to yorksfield later.

Just found out that the ICH9 is "sampling", so it will not be long till full production.

Seems like the ICH8 and 965 family is going to be very short lived.


Tim

Is there any info about ICH9? I wonder what improvements/additions will have with respect to ICH8. I was targetting for an Asus Striker Extreme (680i), but thinking in the low probability that I will use SLI I am now doubting. For now I have the microprocessor in a box, an E6600.
Any idea of production date?

Thanks.

That's the bearlake, coming in May

 

[TheGreatOne]

I'll be happy with the p965 if I can upgrade to yorksfield later.

Just found out that the ICH9 is "sampling", so it will not be long till full production.

Seems like the ICH8 and 965 family is going to be very short lived.


Tim

Is there any info about ICH9? I wonder what improvements/additions will have with respect to ICH8. I was targetting for an Asus Striker Extreme (680i), but thinking in the low probability that I will use SLI I am now doubting. For now I have the microprocessor in a box, an E6600.
Any idea of production date?

Thanks.

The first member of the ICH9 family will be the first week of May, though Intel may move it up a bit for the "plain and "simple" version.

The 975X MB replacement (Bad Axe II) with super RAID version of the ICH9 (ICH9DM) will not make its arrival for a few months after, most likely late Summer 2007.


Tim

 

[Crashman]

Sounds exciting...I can't wait for 2007!!!















Anyone who can wait for 2007, please see your therapist.

 

[Whizzard9992]

The 975X MB replacement (Bad Axe II) with super RAID version of the ICH9 (ICH9DM) will not make its arrival for a few months after, most likely late Summer 2007.


Tim

That's the first I've head of anything called ICH9DM. In fact, google turns up nada (which is 1/2 impressive).

Care to provide a link?

 

[cowardlydragon]

Can you do two matrixed RAID5s on a 4x750GB or 4x1TB drive array? is the 2TB limit per matrix raid segment, or for overall size of the drives being dealt with?

 

[TheGreatOne]

It's 2TB with 4 drives maximum any way you cut it, 4x500, 2x1000, 2x750, 4x400 . . . With the Deskstar 7K1000 having a SRP of 399.00, four of these would make a nice 3TB RAID5 storage volume; but not with the ICH8R as the RAID controller.

I have been unable to confirm if the ICH9 family will overcome this serrious limitation.


Tim

 

[cowardlydragon]

Hmmm, I mean, say you have:

4x1TB physical drives

Can you work around the 2TB limitation by having two separate 2TB RAID5 stripes matrixed across the 4 disks?

As in, split each disk into two 500GB partitions and have two Matrix-RAID5 arrays across the four drives?

Is that an effective workaround?

 

[TheGreatOne]

4x1TB physical drives

No, was orignally planning on 2x150GB-10K-RAID0, and 4 Seagate ES 1TB-RAID5.

Two errors on above, four dives maximum, and no combination of any amount of arrays can exceed a toatal maximum storage amount of 2TB.

Can you work around the 2TB limitation by having two separate 2TB RAID5 stripes matrixed across the 4 disks?

Total connected devices (maximum of 4) in any way must not exceed 2TB

As in, split each disk into two 500GB partitions and have two Matrix-RAID5 arrays across the four drives?

Is that an effective workaround?

Nope.


Tim

 

[TheGreatOne]

I just found out that the 2TB limit has to with LBA addressing, and it seems to be an “on silicon” (chip) issue that has been with us since the ICH7 family was introduced.


Tim

 

[enewmen]

I just found out that the 2TB limit has to with LBA addressing, and it seems to be an “on silicon” (chip) issue that has been with us since the ICH7 family was introduced.


Tim

I guess then the ICH8 doesn't have this limitation?

 

[TheGreatOne]

I just found out that the 2TB limit has to with LBA addressing, and it seems to be an “on silicon” (chip) issue that has been with us since the ICH7 family was introduced.


Tim

I guess then the ICH8 doesn't have this limitation?

ICH8 seems to have been a rushed refresh of the ICH7, and the ICH9 is already pretty much ready to roll. If it (the ICH9) is based on the new foundation that was introuduced with ICH7 as was ICH8, then we will have the same issue with the ICH9.

Some older RAID HBA's can not go past 2TB per array due to the LBA issue. So it seems that Intel went "old school".


Tim

 

[enewmen]

I just found out that the 2TB limit has to with LBA addressing, and it seems to be an “on silicon” (chip) issue that has been with us since the ICH7 family was introduced.


Tim

I guess then the ICH8 doesn't have this limitation?

ICH8 seems to have been a rushed refresh of the ICH7, and the ICH9 is already pretty much ready to roll. If it (the ICH9) is based on the new foundation that was introuduced with ICH7 as was ICH8, then we will have the same issue with the ICH9.

Some older RAID HBA's can not go past 2TB per array due to the LBA issue. So it seems that Intel went "old school".


Tim

Do we need to wait for the Gesher Microarchitecture before Intel fixes all the old problems and kills the south-bridge? Maybe we will be luckly and Nehalem fixes it all.

 

[Whizzard9992]

If it's truly just an LBA issue, then in theory you should be able to go above 2GB on the controller. 6 750 drives in 3 RAID 0 configs would put you at 4.5TB total. You could then use the OS to marry them to one drive.

You couldn't do RAID 5 with all 6 drives, but you might want to do that with a dedicated controller anyway.

 

[enewmen]

If it's truly just an LBA issue, then in theory you should be able to go above 2GB on the controller. 6 750 drives in 3 RAID 0 configs would put you at 4.5TB total. You could then use the OS to marry them to one drive.

You couldn't do RAID 5 with all 6 drives, but you might want to do that with a dedicated controller anyway.

Makes Sense. Never actually tried it though.

 

[TheGreatOne]

It seems to be partly a LBA issue, and deliberate crippling by Intel (as to make the ESB2 seem even more valuable and can support 6 SATA drives).


Tim

 

[leexgx]

that was anoying i got 4x 80 maxta hdds to frigin found out its an dam rebadged 7200.9 Segate grr i not even going to bother testing them in my pc as i get the same results

as an queston what size should i set up my RAID 0 in (Strip sixe 4kb 8kb and so on)

i going to post my 4xMaxtor 80gb RAID 0 setup i had before (doing what that ICH8 is doing now in tomshardware) some of them was fast tests but thay do

 

[_artanis_]

hey!
I have a question about the Intel Matrix Technology, everywhere in the web is shown the example of creating a RAID 0 and a RAID 1 on a pair of disks, but it is possible to create just a RAID 0 (not occuping the whole pair of disks) and use the left space as two different partitions??

Example: using 2x250GB:

| D || D |
| I || I |
| S || S |
| K || K |
| 1 || 2 |

Create :
[ BOTH ] --->RAID 0 (200GB)
[ 1 ][ 2 ] ----> rest of the disks as a normal partitions (2x150GB)

has anyone tried this??

 

[USMC2Hard4U]

I am having this same issue with the Intel Raid Drivers and Vista. My setup works, however its slow and the iastor gives me an error.

If I chose to use AHCI, and run my hard drives sepratley should I use the Windows Vista Default AHCI driver? Or should I use the Intel Matrix Storage Program and the AHCI Drivers from there?