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. We used a new Raptor 150 GB 10k RPM hard drive for the test drive.
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.
All three of our I/O tests show strong results on the M2N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard; in particular in the USB and FireWire results when compared to the XPress 3200 chipset.
