SATA, USB and FireWire Speeds
Using HDTach 3.0.1.0 and a few handy peripherals, we were able to get some benchmark numbers off of both the SATA controllers on the boards as well as the USB and FireWire connections.
SATA Performance — South Bridge
Here we tested the two south bridge based SATA controllers. On the A8R32 that means the ULi M1575 chipset and on the A8N32 that is the NVIDIA MCP. We used a new Raptor 150 GB 10k RPM hard drive for the test drive.
SATA Performance — Third Party
This test looks at the extra SATA controllers on the motherboards, and in this instance both are the same Silicon Image 3132 logic.
USB Performance
Taking a 7200 RPM IDE external hard drive from Western Digital we use HDTach to find the top transfer speeds on both motherboards.
FireWire Performance
This external drive has both USB 2.0 and FireWire support so these results are from the same drive with the FireWire connection.
The performance on the integrated SATA controllers show nearly identical burst and read scores, though the write results show a large advantage to the ULi M1575 SATA implementation. The results were repeated many times as I didn’t believe what I was seeing. On the secondary controller the results are identical.
The USB performance shows that again the ULi M1575 doesn’t have enough to keep up with the NVIDIA chipset in this case. Burst, read and write have several MB/s gains on the NVIDIA side. FireWire scores are the same on either board too.
