We have our F5U197 from Belkin in our test rig which is based on the following parts.

• Intel Core2Duo E6600 @ 2.4GHz 4MB FSB1066
• Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 iP965
• XFX GeForce 8800GTX XXX 630MHz GPU 768MB DDR3
• 2 GB Corsair XMS2-6400 Twin2X2048
• 3x Western Digital WD2500JS 250GB 7200rpm 8MB SATA2
• Windows Vista Ultimate

Also in this review we used the 2.5 inch SATA drive from Samsung with model number HM121HI, a 5400rpm drive on 120GB that does its job, quite well.

It seems that we get a slightly lower burst speed when using our disk over the F5U197. That is probably because it is a slightly slower drive than our normal 7200rpm drives and may cause a slower burst rate.

If you take a look at the average speed there is only a 0.03 – 0.10 MB/s difference between using the motherboard connector. You will most probably not be able to notice that difference in the long run ;)

Looks like we have a well working product here.

One thing that I noticed during installation was that there is no management utility that is compatible with Windows Vista. I got an installation error when trying to install the utility.



So the only way to control and overview the RAID functions is by the DOS-like interface that is available right after BIOS has loaded. For a normal home user, this is good enough though.

Head over to our last page to find out the score.