ULi M1575 for ATI Crossfire – SATA2 and Fast USB for the ATI Chipset

USB, Firewire & Storage Performance

After looking at many options for Firewire and USB testing, we finally determined that an external USB 2.0, Firewire 400, and Firewire 800 hard disk might be a sensible way to look at USB and Firewire throughput.

Our first efforts at testing with an IDE or SATA drive as the “server” yielded very inconsistent results, since Windows XP sets up cache schemes to improve performance. Finally, we decided to set try a RAM disk as our “server”, since memory removed almost all overhead from the serving end. We also managed to turn off disk caching on the USB and Firewire side by setting up the drives for “quick disconnect” and our results were then consistent over many test runs.

We used just 1GB of fast 2-2-2 system memory set up as a 450MB RAM disk and 550MB of system memory. Our stock file was the SPECviewPerf install file, which is 432,533,504 bytes (412.4961MB). After copying this file to our RAM disk, we measured the time for writing from the RAM disk to our external USB 2.0 or Firewire 400 or Firewire 800 drive using a Windows timing program written for AnandTech by our own Jason Clark. The copy times in seconds were then converted into Megabits per second (Mb) to provide a convenient means of comparing throughput. Higher rates therefore mean better performance.

The ULi M1575 Reference Board does not have Firewire on board – it is optional. Therefore, only USB could be tested. The USB sustained transfer rates are double those of the ATI SB450, and only a bit lower than rates on the NVIDIA nForce4 chipset. Our testing certainly supports ULi’s claim that their USB 2.0 solution is competitive in the marketplace with other chipset USB 2.0. The M1575 is entering the market now, while the ATI SB600 is not slated until early 2006. With that timetable, it is very understandable why many ATI chipset motherboard makers will choose ULi instead.