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.

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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.

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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.

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SATA performance is equal across the board, though on the USB test we see the Intel chipset having a healthy lead.  Unfortunately, the Asus M2A-VM motherboard doesn’t have any Firewire support; but looking at the MSI K9AGM2 board, the AMD 690 chipset’s SB600 south bridge can’t keep up with Intel’s solution.

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