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On-board RAID vs. PCI-E controller RAID?

S

superdx

Junior Member
Is there a performance difference? I'm looking to do RAID 0+1 with 2x250GB drives, and the whole purpose is so that I can get faster seek + load times. The on-board controller has some problems that I don't particularly want to deal with (i.e. 1 of the recognized SATA ports is external, ugh) so I am looking at a PCI-E solution. If anyone could offer any advice on this, it'd be much appreciated.
 
Hardware RAID [PCI-e card] is in general faster than software RAID [motherboard] because it has its own dedicated I/O processor and dedicated write cache on the chip. However, for 2 drives, you wouldn't notice a difference in RAID 1 or 0, but if you plan to go on to RAID 01/10 with 4 drives, a card would be a good choice. Make sure that it's a proper hardware card though, not a $20 software RAID card.
 
Those $30-50 PCI-e cards are not going to get you TRUE hardware RAID. They still offload the processing to the CPU. It's the same as on-board RAID.
 
Originally posted by: MrCoyote
Those $30-50 PCI-e cards are not going to get you TRUE hardware RAID. They still offload the processing to the CPU. It's the same as on-board RAID.
Click to expand...
Entry-level hardware RAID starts at $150 for dedicated I/O processor with X/OR offload and does not guarantee higher I/O performance than integrated RAID. There are many documented cases where integrated RAID has higher I/O performance than hardware RAID.

Hardware RAID offers guaranteed performance, not to be confused with higher or more or better performance. This merely means that whatever processing loads are placed on the system CPU, it won't affect your RAID performance (and vice versa).

The entry-level hardware RAID solutions are not all that good, actually. Figure at least $200 for decent hardware RAID controllers, $300 to break into the good ones, with great RAID solutions being higher still.

Don't get me wrong, good hardware RAID is nice, but is it $300 nice?
 
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