OnBoard Raid vs Raid controller card

[MonkeyK]

What do you all think about on-board raid compared to controller cards? I was all set to get an MSI KT3 Ultra, until I took a look at 3ware's Escalade 7210. It looks like this ATA Raid card actually improves performance for Raid 1! Does anyone have any experience with this card? Do you know of any other cards that improve performance in Raid 1?


-Mike

 

[mechBgon]

Hmm, but would you ever notice the difference? It's $135 at hypermicro for the 7210. That's more than the whole KT3 motherboard costs, and the 7210 will hit its stride best in a 64-bit PCI slot, which most consumer-level motherboards don't have. Maybe there's a better area to spend that money, like going to the Western Digital Special Edition drives (if you weren't planning to already).

As far as I understand, the place where a well-designed RAID1 controller could have an advantage is that it can get your data from whichever drive has its heads closest to the data at that instant. SCSI RAID controllers and some IDE RAID controllers also have an onboard cache that could help out.