Boot and load times
To test system boot and game level load times, we busted out our trusty stopwatch.

Our ICH7R and nForce4 systems use different motherboards with different POST sequences, so it's hard to compare boot times between them. However, the results clearly show that the time needed to scan for and initialize a RAID array on either chipset slows the boot process by enough for our single-drive configurations to come out on top.

Results in our level load time tests are more varied, but the single-drive configurations prove tough to beat. The nForce4 is noticeably slower than the ICH7R with a number of configurations in the Far Cry test and in a couple of instances in DOOM 3.

Array rebuild times
Our array rebuild tests simulate a drive failure by removing and formatting one drive in an array. The system is booted with the drive disconnected to ensure that the array functions properly without it, and we time the rebuild process after the drive is reconnected. Curiously, our ICH7R RAID 10 configuration wouldn't accept our formatted drive back into the array, citing a hardware error. We had to use another drive, a 500GB Hitachi DeskStar 7K500, to get the RAID 10 array to rebuild. We didn't have any such problems with our RAID 1 or 5 rebuilds on the ICH7R.

Reconstructing a RAID array takes a while, regardless of the system or array configuration. The ICH7R's RAID 5 rebuilds are a little quicker than those of the nForce4, but the tables turn with the RAID 1 array.