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The scores under NT show a slight difference under this benchmark, giving up an average of 1500 Kps in each mark, but here’s where the NT support really shined -look at those CPU marks! How’s a 3.8 % utilization score sound when using a single disk :)? Well –since we don’t plan on using this card with a single hard drive, how did it do on a stripe set- a very nice 6.3%! And finally when using RAID 1 setup the CPU still doesn’t suffer that much, only getting taxed a small 17.5 %. I would have to say that even though there was a small performance difference between the two operating systems, the CPU utilization must be taken into consideration –especially for those PC video editors out there who think this may be your cure-all pill for frame skipping. If you're not using a hardware based editing card, you may still see those frame rates jump when recording or playing back that video under Windows 98, since the CPU will be doing ALL the work. I would recommend using a better platform such as Windows NT for that sort of task anyways, and these tests proves that point a little better.

HD Tach NT Raid Single - click to enlarge

HD Tach NT Raid 0 - click to enlarge

HD Tach NT Mirror- click to enlarge

Conclusion

So how can you consume all this data and make it fit into your decision on whether or not this card is for you?

ATA 100 is sure to be in the mainstream configuration of all new computers simply because it’s the fastest IDE interface But during all our tests we never actually saw a 100 MB/s burst , but we did see some very nice scores proving to us that IDE can be taken a step further and impact your system performance with a RAID 0, or even handle the load of Data redundancy with a RAID 1 when using the SIDE card. The SIDE ATA 100 has some very nice features in combonation with the long 5 year warranty -make this card a good value, especially when compared to higher priced SCSI based solutions.

However, since we didn’t see a huge increase over average ATA 66 scores, and the CPU was taxed slightly higher in Windows 98, the Iwill SIDE card receives a 85% score.