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We'd like to thank Tagan for supplying the additional power supply and Gigabyte for supplying both the Gigabyte P965-DS3P and Radeon X1950 Pro for this article. And of course, thanks to Hitachi and Western Digital for allowing us to spend more time with their 160 GB Deskstar and Caviar drives a little bit longer.

Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 socket LGA-775
4 x 512 MB A-DATA Vitesta 5-5-5-18 PC6400 DDR2-SDRAM
Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro 256 MB graphics card
Gigabyte P965-DS3P Intel P965 motherboard
LiteOn 1673S DVD-RW
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
ATI Catalyst 7.2 reference driver
Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility 8.1.0.1006
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest,final builds.

The graphs are pretty self explanatory, but in case you can't see the text, they're arranged in groups of three colors: green for single drive results,  blue for RAID 0 array results and finally, red for RAID 0 array results with Volume Write Back enabled (only with the ICH8R). Results are in milliseconds, so 25821 means 25.821 seconds. Remember - shorter bars mean better performance.

The results:

With single drive configurations, the J-Micron controllers has the edge over Intel's ICH8R. But not so with RAID 0 arrays - the Desktars array is a little bit slower with Intel ICH8R (even with Volume Write Back Cache enabled) while the Caviar is slightly faster in RAID 0 on the J-Micron controller.

The most likely explanation for longer load times when Volume Write Back Cache enabled with the Caviar array is CPU utilization. After all, when a game loads a level, it's very likely there are some other process running besides just loading and copying data from the hard drive to main memory (RAM). However, it's interesting to see how both drives behave so differently - the Deskstar array seem to 'like' Volume Write Back Cache very much. 

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