Onboard RAID Testing:

     For testing we'll be using ClubOC's water cooled rig that started with Swiftech's Quiet Power P180 water cooled chassis. We then we added the EVGA 680i motherboard, an Intel C2D E6700, Mushkin Extreme Performance XP2-8500 DDR2, and a pair of EVGA GeForce 7600GT video cards. Last we added the 4x Seagate 7200.10 SATA Hard Drives.

     For benchmarking hard drive performance we use Hard Drive Tach. HD Tach has proven very reliable for us over the years and we like to stick with what works.

     The following tests will be conducted using the EVGA 680i onboard SATA RAID. We will start out with one hard drive and work our way up to all 4 in RAID 0 and then in RAID 5.

Single Hard Drive Test

     To establish a base line for the tests we start out with a single Seagate hard drive. A single hard drive on the EVGA 680i motherboard gave us pretty standard results.

2x Hard Drives in RAID 0

     With two hard drives running in RAID 0 and striping at 64k, we see a very nice increase in speed. It's easy to see the advantages in running in RAID 0 just with 2 hard drives.

3x Hard Drives in RAID 0

     With 3 hard drives running off the integrated RAID controller on the 680i we start to see a problem. The data read and write speeds are still fast, but there is no increase in performance. This means the integrated controller can not transfer data any faster and is maxed out with just 2 hard drives. 3 or even 4 drives will not make any difference in speed with this particular controller.

4x Hard Drives in RAID 0

     When we include the 4th and final drive in our RAID array we actually see a decrease in average read performance, however the burst and write speeds increased. Even though the burst and write speeds increased, it is painfully clear that we did in fact max out the average hard drive read performance of the integrated SATA RAID controller with just 2 hard drives.