(On-board) RAID: Which is better?

[aa_koch]

Can anyone tell me if on-board RAID controllers (Promise, Highpoint) are equally good compared to those seperate cards (FastTrak 100) you buy in the store? I'm thinking about buying a second hard drive, and would like to create a RAID 0 array. At the same time, I am thinking about upgrading to a new motherboard with the KT-133A chipset. (I'm using an ASUS A7V with 100MHz FSB now.) However, I'm not sure if I should purchase a motherboard with a RAID controller, or buy a controller seperately. From a financial point of view, I would be best served with an on-board solution. However, because of the price difference (buying a seperate card costs more when you consider that a mobo with RAID controller is usually only $10 - $20 more expensive than a comparable mainboard without RAID), I assume that there are features that come with a seperate card that aren't included in the on-board controller.

To make a long story short: Are seperate (Promise) RAID controllers of better quality (or deliver higher transfer rates, more possibilities, etc.) than on-board RAID controllers?

 

[aa_koch]

Nobody?

 

[GrInNer]

I don't know which is better, but I use the AMI Hyperdisk that comes on the IWill KA-266-r MB. Here are my numbers in Sandra 2001, if you can get others to drop thier stats you should be able to do a reasonable comparison. I ran the Sandra BMark in WinME, with all apps closed.

With Windows Cache ignored:
Drive Index 31,865
Buffered Read - 64MB/s
Seq. Read - 59MB/s
Random Read - 6MB/s

Buffered Write - 7MB/s
Seq. Write - 7MB/s
Ramdom Write - 6MB/s

Average Access Time - 9ms

 

[butthead]

The highpoint controller on my Abit KT7A-R was flaky as could be. Disk-to-disk copies were slow and near impossible to complete (from one disk to another on the controller). Promise controller on my A7V133 is smooth and speedy, although it doesn't do RAID 1. I can't speak for the HPT controller on other boards (if this was just an abit issue). Transfer rates on either using Sandra are close, with the HPT perhaps edging out the Promise a little, although the filesystem you use and cluster sizes will affect your performance far more.

 

[GrInNer]

butthead makes a good point, the AMI controller handles raid 0, 1 or 1+0 and I have it configured with 64bit clusters. I had similar slow (I mean r-e-a-l-l-y slow) disk to disk copies on the IWill board, but that was fixed when I got the newest driver set. Config on the controller was very easy, but if you want a stripe across four drives you will have to do it manually (autoconfig breaks the 4 drives into 2 stripes).