Six SSDs in RAID 0: Intel vs AMD - which chipset scales the best?

Intel Z77 chipset

For the test with the Intel Z77 chipset we used the ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe motherboard. The Intel Z77 chipset supports six SATA ports, with the two primary ports being SATA 600, and the four remaining ones SATA 300. We connected the startup disk to the extra Marvell controller, so the six Intel ports remained available for the RAID configuration. The processor we used was an Ivy Bridge Intel Core i7 3770K. Of course the latest Intel drivers were installed as well.

The fact that port three through six on the motherboard were "merely" SATA 300 did make us sceptical at first, but in spite of this the performance scaled very well. The AS SSD total score goes from 868 points up to 2,509 points. The sequential read speed shows an interesting trend. With one SSD we get 426 MB/s, with two we get 765 MB/s. Adding a third SSD does not improve performance, however. We clearly notice here that the RAID 0 array is limited by the third SSD working on SATA 300 speed, which means about 250 MB/s. Starting with the fourth disk we see the results scale to 1,147 MB/s. More than one gigabyte per second is quite impressive.

The sequential write speed is linear, contrary to the read speed. We get 185 MB/s with one disk, 363 MB/s with two and all the way up to 1 GB/s with six SSDs. You definitely notice this in practice. Reading and writing with 64 threads also scales nicely up to six disks. The 4K read and write tests with one thread can't take advantage of a RAID 0 array. Access time is a little higher with two disks than with one, but is constant after that.

With six SSDs in RAID 0 on the Intel board you can read and write at speeds in excess of 1 GB/s. Can AMD equal this?