875 raid support

[pinki]

in reading the different 875 reviews something was not clear to me about the raid support

in reading the 875 chipset review it said if you have the ich5r then you got native raid support through the southbridge which should enable the full 150mBps but never went further in the msi review the sata raid was on a seperate raid controller which i assume would have been on the pci bus negating the performance of sata

so i went to my local retaler and they had three 875's asus which doesnt have csa so i wont buy it and msi and intels own i was leening toward msi but if the native raid is on the pci bus i would rather go with the intel if the native raid is ich5r direct

i coulb be completely missing something in that the raid on msi though using a seperate controller is still using the ich5 but then the parallel controller would also be tied to the ich5 which would be nice

and just to warn you performance means nothing to me i only want to know the answers to my questions

 

[Lord Evermore]

If the board does not use ICH5R, then the RAID controller is separate and runs over the PCI bus. The parallel IDE controller and SATA controller is native to the ICH5 in both versions, but only the R version has native RAID functions. So if you just want SATA, then you don't need the R version.

The CSA capability would be almost useless to you. If you don't use gigabit Ethernet with significant heavy usage, then the performance of the PCI bus is perfectly fine.

The MSI Neo-FIS2R has both the ICH5R SATA RAID function and a Promise controller for 2 more ports of SATA RAID. The Neo-LSR also has native Intel SATA RAID but no Promise controller (and no CSA).

Asus only has one model of 875P board, the P4C800 Deluxe. Other boards with the 865 chipset can't have CSA because 865 doesn't have it.

There isn't yet a significant difference in performance for most drives using the PCI bus controller or a native chipset controller. Even a couple of Raptor drives in RAID striping get just over 100MBps streaming (and how often does your CPU need to pull data at that speed for more than a moment?). Having it native is nice because it's one less chip and set of drivers that have to be installed.

You should make sure you use terms properly. "Native" indicates it's built into the chipset, like ICH5R. "Integrated" can mean it's built into the chipset or that it uses a separate controller on the motherboard, but in both cases just means it doesn't use an expansion card. A function that uses an extra chip on the motherboard can't be called native.

Also, punctuation is good. Capitalization is nice too but can be done without if necessary.

 

[pinki]

so the promise controller is over the pci bus giving two more sata raid ports but not direct thru southbridge

so how would that effect performance of a 4 drive raid 0 i wouldnt be able to do it natively would i because they would use 2 different controllers

in reading on msi boards they said non of the parallel ata controllers are on the south bridge they are all on the pci bus


so what about the intel brand board a couple of questions about it does it have native firewire support built in sound?

 

[Lord Evermore]

The Promise controller provides one parallel ATA port and 2 SATA ports, all on the PCI bus. The normal 2 PATA ports from the ICH5R are native and not on the PCI bus, and so are the 2 SATA Intel ports.

You won't be able to configure hardware RAID using all 4 ports. The Intel controller and the Promise controller can only run separate RAID arrays. You could use software RAID but they would be limited to the performance of the slower controller.