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 — Silicon Image
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.
Getting into the more motherboard oriented tests as opposed to the CPU-based tests, the Asus N4L-VM DH motherboard shows us some very impressive results in the area of IO and storage. The primary and secondary SATA controllers on the Asus N4L board (the Intel south bridge and Silicon Image chip respectively) have performance on par or better than that of the nForce4 SLI based motherboard and the X2 processor it is running on. USB and FireWire performance is good as well.
