RAID 0: mobo vs PCI card

[dpopiz]

does it make a difference for performance?

 

[wickley]

I don't know about performance, but I have a PCI IDE controller I've used for a few years, and the great thing about it is that it's damn easy to move the raid array to a new computer if you upgrade down the road. That alone was worth the price of admission. Moving to another mobo based solution would mean having to find the exact same onboard solution on your next board, or else you have to break and recreate the array.

 

[Madwand1]

I'll bite. Yes, it can make a difference -- the 132 MB/s or so total bandwidth of the PCI bus risks being saturated by such devices, esp. with several drives or if you add a gigabit PCI card to the mix -- so I'd avoid PCI bus implementations.

The only downside is that you're tied to the MB / chipset vendor, whereas you might be able to take the card with you to another system. NForce 5-whatever will have RAID 5 support too. I'd want that, assuming it performs and shows compatibility by being able to up-convert NForce 4 RAID.

PCIe RAID cards (4x) would be another alternative.

 

[Jiggz]

Personally, I prefer add in cards since it's less work when switching mobo. But then with XP, it's always recommended to do a clean install (although you can just use sysprep if you don't want to) whenever you switch mobo so I'll say save your money and just use the built in RAID. So what I do is always have a clone back up of the RAID, for crash and update purposes.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Never bothered with onboard (mobo) RAID, but I would never try, just because of the features available on my RAID card. And I'm not sure about the PCI bandwidth issue, as I have no idea about that. PCI-X (not PCI-e) here.