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Overall the AMI Hyperdisk has a lot to offer. Remember to keep in mind that this is an IDE RAID controller –not SCSI so we shouldn’t expect to see any performance marks even close to SCSI. But we were hoping to see higher marks when using RAID 0 configurations –with slightly lower CPU marks. Even though the CPU is always going to be taxed when using any kind of RAID controller, anywhere over 50% seems rather high.

RAID 1 scores were as expected –and prove this controller can be used in a data redundant RAID 1 without a great lose of performance- but again, those CPU marks were rather high!

The Hyperdisk package has got all you need to have a decent IDE RAID setup. The price for the Hyperdisk 100 is an average $99, which isn’t bad, and it should serve most who are looking for about a 20-30% gain in disk performance over single disk configurations well. In addition the Hyperdisk has full RAID 1 support as well as Disk sparing support.

Some other things that need to be mentioned about the Hyperdisk controller since this product was handed to us for review, is there is rumor on the NET that AMI has released Linux support for the Hyperdisk (but we can’t verify this) –still if it’s true it’ll make us Penguins happyJ . And there are a few motherboard venders that are now releasing the AMI RAID chipset with their new system boards –which makes IDE RAID even more attractive!

AMI is trying hard to wedge their way to the top of the IDE RAID market, and their new ATA 100 ready IDE Hyperdisk controller helps take them a little higher. Although it’s not the best performer we’ve seen thus far (especially with CPU utilization) it’s a solid product and has a decent price tag.

Final Score: 80%