Benchmarks: Storage
Our final page of testing covers storage: SATA, USB and FireWire.
SATA
The sustained transfer rate here is clearly that of the hard disk, none of the boards running into any trouble.
KN9 SLI seems to be the burstiest board, with both ASUS boards performing almost the same. Sturgeon's SATA implementation isn't quite as speedy.
As with transfer rate, no board adds any overhead to the drive's access times.
The ASUS CROSSHAIR and M2N32-SLI Deluxe boards both appear to have sound SATA interfaces, then.
USB
We've had a few boards of late with somewhat iffy USB performance. Some of those have been based on older ATI southbridges, known for lacklustre USB throughput, while others were unexpectedly poor. Let's see if our two ASUS boards are up to scratch in this department.
Evidently, no trouble with the ASUS boards, compared to abit's 570 SLI offering, which couldn't give us the kind of performance we'd like to see. ATI's Sturgeon reference board doesn't perform too well either.
FireWire
All boards have perfectly good FireWire implementations, the two nForce 590 SLI boards proving to be the fastest by a small margin.
All in all, excellent storage performance from the CROSSHAIR and M2N32-SLI boards, with no nasty surprises.
