From the couple reviews and comments I've seen over the last weeks, the Gigabyte controller has pretty similar performance to the Intel one, perhaps even slightly faster than the ICH8R. The Gigabyte controller did seem to have a higher CPU load in RAID mode, though. I'm guessing it doesn't make much difference but I'd like to hear more comments, since I have a similar setup (Two SATA raptors, SATA WD Caviar SE, Samsung SATA burner).
Some related questions:
1) If I put the RAID raptors on the ICH8R, should I still enable AHCI on the Jmicron controller for the third SATA drive (Caviar SE) and Samsung SATA optical drive?
2) Is there any issue with using an F6 floppy disk for driver install of two controllers? In other words, will the Windows XP32 setup prompt me to insert two separate floppy disks, one for each controller? I've never setup RAID or AHCI, so I would like to know in advance what to expect. If I need to have one integrated floppy disk or CD-ROM for both sets of drivers, what exactly do I need to do?
3) If I do setup the ICH8R as RAID for the Raptors, has anyone seen any performance tests showing that it would be better to put the other drive and optical disk on the Jmicron like jph1589 said, rather than to put all four on the Intel ICH8R ports?
Thank you!