This sort of leads me to believe it's an onboard SATA RAID controller.

Everyone that posted in this thread with their awesome results (meaning where their results should be), mind telling me when you purchased your DFI board and what bios it came with when it shipped?

I'm starting to believe that the older boards such as Max's and mine are older. Hence, poor RAID performance due to age of chipset.

Last week, I had just RMA'ed my two Hitachi drives because they were having piss poor performance. And my board is pretty old as well. Purchased in April of 2005.