Intel Ivy Bridge 3770K and Z77 Chipset Reviewed

For our storage benchmarks, we simply wanted to see how Ivy Bridge handled two SSDs in RAID 0 and how well they performed when used in high-stress environments. Judging by our results, we were able to determine that the performance is in-line with what we would expect from an X79 or Z68 board indicating very little to no performance increases in terms of storage performance.

We did our testing with two Patriot Pyro SE 240GB SSDs in RAID 0 using the SATA 6Gb/s ports on the Gigabyte Z77-UD3H

In both benchmarks above, you can see that we were able to break 1GB/s reads on the array and in ATTO we were able to break 1GB/s writes. Since we consider ATTO to be more of a theoretical benchmark, we decided to run a few benchmarks to give a better ballpark idea of overall performance.

Here you can see that overall, our results average out around 1GB/s read and about 550 MB/s write. Unfortunately, even though the drives claim 510MB/s writes individually in reality SandForce's 2281 controllers generally don't deliver this (only in ATTO) and as a result you will see about half that in real world performance in RAID as the Z77 illustrates.