Promise SATA or Intel SATA

Question

has anyone actually got down to the nitty gritty of testing the difference between the Promise 376/378 SATA/RAID Controller and the Intel SATA/RAID controller.
first let me start by saying i have the older Maxtor 160gig SATA drives, both have the oder chipset on them, the one that the sticky post says is a "buggy" chipset.
well i can confirm that, from the drives being noisy, to whats seems to be slow performance, to the fact that every week the raid is failing, and i have to rebuild or reconfirm the raid, to the drives just failing when the system boots.
whats odd is that every single diagnostics i have run, and its not just the maxtor utility. ive tried several others, all say the drives are independantly good and that the RAID0 STRIPE is good.
but one of the drives shows FAILED in the Intel SATA Status screen. but windows loads fine and everything seems to be ok.
but today i booted up and chkdsk ran for no reason and i had tons of file errors.
so im tired of it,
im now trying the primise SATA controller. and if they continue to fail,,, i am RMA'ing them with maxtor. screw it i cant afford to have the drives failing every week and sometimes constantly everyday.
so,,, for ME, Promise is the leader in SATA and RAID, RAID to me has always been Lead by Seagate, but i havent seen any of their SATA controller, but i have had GREAT luck with other promise IDE controllers ive used.
has anyone actually tested the performance,. stability and such of the promise 376-378 controller ?
is it better than the Intel SATA controller?  more stable ? faster ?

Answer 1

8kb sectors huh ?
how you setting up the intel raid  ?
my 865PE neo2 fis2r wont allow you to change the size. are you going pack with partition magic or something and changing it?
or are you just partitioning a seperate partition like i do for all your games and telling windows to use a different sector size.
and to kind lay out a bit of the graphics frame rate increase your claiming is from the larger sector size.
graphics lag isnt going to increase THAT much , simply because of one HUGE reason.
constant frame rates are measured by the graphics that are being rendered, those graphics being rendered are in video ram, system ram, and those about to be rendered or a section of the map about to be loaded is in the page file and possibly in a temp file in the game dir.
thats a pretty large increase to be saying simply sector size did it,,, ive been gaming for quite a long time, and sure disk access time effects loading but it will ONLY effect game frame rates when your dealing with a game that is CONSTANTLY loading sounds levels and sections of a map, ie seamless loading.
Rainbow six ravenshield does not do this, it loads pretty much everything it needs into your ram, and video ram. with minimal access to your hard drive. changing to 8kb size isnt going to effect it the way your talking about, not a 20 frames per second increase.
now BF 1942,, it plays a bit differently, because of the size of it levels and the fact that there can be a huge amount of things going onscreen, yes it tends to access the disk alot, so a different or more efficient disk sectoring could infact increase performance.
im pretty sure your performance is coming from some place else.
but because im a sucker for performance, im gunna give this a try, i have a partition i just partitioned and havent loaded yet, im gunna reformat with a 8kb setting and load up a game, one that i know how it performs, and ill report back with what i find out..