SATA Hard Drives on J-Micron and Intel controllers
SATA II controllersWe were not completely satisfied with our hard drive round up. That's mainly due to the compatibility issues we encountered during the testing for that article. Is the problem we encountered due to a bad chipset, a bad drive or a bad implementation? This simply won't do, so we asked around and search the Internet for answers. It would seem that we are not the only one having problems with ICH8R and more specifically with the Gigabyte P965-DS3P. Users in forums everywhere have some issue or another with RAID or SATA single drive performance on the P965-DS3P and its earlier sibling as well, the P965-DS3.
Gigabyte P965-DS3P ICH8R problems
After asking Gigabyte's representative and searching the web for answers, it would seem the Gigabyte have actually provided a solution to this problem. It would seem the problem is related to the Marvell LAN controller used by Gigabyte. So, this 'bug' is not only specific to DS3 or DS3P alone. The solution is pretty simple - update the Marvell's EEPROM chip. The necessary files are available on Gigabyte's website, here. This is the link to the P965-DS3O FAQ page, if you're using a different motherboard, please check your respective motherboard's FAQ page.Because updating the EEPROM must be done in a pure DOS environment, you might want to have a DOS bootdisk handy. Several websites on the net can provide you with the necessary bootdisk if you do not have one. The update is simple - Gigabyte have provided a batch file 'EEP.bat' in the update, just run the batch file and the EEPROM flash should be done in a matter of seconds. Of course, you need to restart the PC to see any changes. After a restart, a HD Tach Sequential Write test run confirmed the Western Digital Caviar 1600AJS is working normally with ICH8R controller.
ICH8R
The onboard ICH8R SATA / RAID controller is generally regarded as one of the best onboard storage controller in the market. This is in no small part due to Intel's long experience in designing chipsets. The ICH8R does not only fully support SATA II peripherals and Native Command Queueing (NCQ), but also offer some performance enhancing features as well. One is the support for Hard Drive Write Cache and the second is Volume Write Back Cache. These two features are only supported with RAID arrays. The help file for Intel's Matrix Storage console mentioned that Volume Write Back Cache is only supported for RAID 5 arrays, but actually you can enable it even with RAID 0 arrays.
So, today in addition to seeing what the 160 GB Hitachi Deskstar and Western Digital Caviar have to offer in single and RAID 0 configurations have to offer with Intel ICH8R controller, we will be also seeing what Volume Write Back Cache can offer for RAID 0 users. Of course, we will compare the results to what we got with the J-Micron controller from our previous article.
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