A8N SLI Premium - Onboard Raid

[RoosterKooster]

Is the Asus A8N SLI Premium's onboard raid software raid or hardware raid?

Did anyone use a PCI-X sata card to have true hardware raid on an A8N?

Thanks,

 

[Capt Caveman]

Hardware RAID via Nforce4 or Silicon Image Chipsets.

 

[RoosterKooster]

Thanks. A friend at work was telling me most onboard raid is not true HW raid.

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: Capt Caveman
Hardware RAID via Nforce4 or Silicon Image Chipsets.

Totally untrue. nForce4 and SI RAID do _not_ provide hardware-assisted RAID. Both use the dmraid driver in Linux, which is only for soft-RAID usage. All the nForce4 and SI do are create logical sets of disks for the BIOS. They don't provide any sort of XOR engine for RAID 5, for instance.

-Erwos

 

[ElTorrente]

Consider them "Software" RAID. Just look at how high people's CPU utilization is using either of these Raid solutions - especially with 4 disks! They will work o.k... but you gotta spend some dough if you want a "real" raid solution.

 

[RoosterKooster]

Thanks erwos and ElTorrente.

 

[ElTorrente]

Originally posted by: RoosterKooster
Thanks erwos and ElTorrente.

no problem - nothing wrong with them though- remember that! They will perform just fine - just remember that your CPU is being taxed with operating them. I've seen some people's HD benchmarks showing over 15% CPU utilization or more - that's just way too much, in my book.

 

[erwos]

Ironically, a good software RAID implementation (think Linux) outperforms most hardware solutions if you can overlook the CPU hit. I've used Linux software RAID 1 and 5 many times in production environments, and have no complaints.

-Erwos

 

[RoosterKooster]

I read a review earlier today where the s/w raid outdid 3Ware and BroadCom HW raid. It was a P4 MB.

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=r52005&page=1