RAID controllers: faster even on single drives?

[giocopiano]

I found onboard RAID IDE would boot up in 30% reduced time in Windows 2000 compared to a VIA IDE. Large file transfers were also faster with a single drive.
Tell me, are RAID controllers always faster than integrated board IDE and have you ever tried to measure it on your system?
I am more interested in trouble-free booting from different drives than anything else, using the controller as a separate IDE channel.
Now RAID cards are available quite cheaply, does anybody have experience with cheap PCI RAID cards. That is ~$30.

 

[Megatomic]

I have never used a standalone PCI RAID card but my last few motherboards have had Highpoint RAID chips on them and I have used them. My hard drives operate better on the Highpoint controller than they do on the VIA IDE by a long shot whether they are RAIDed or single IDE drives.

This is why I am not getting an NForce2 board yet, no onboard parallel IDE RAID loving can be found there.

 

[dullard]

I think it probably has more to do with the drivers you use than anything else. Different optimizations can easilly shave 30% off a boot time.

 

[giocopiano]

Same situation in DOS and boot.
Real world experience someone?

 

[techfuzz]

I concur, I experience better results running from onboard RAID controllers than the onboard VIA IDE controller.

techfuzz

 

[giocopiano]

Do people put both drives of a RAID configuration on a RAID controller? I was wondering if certain operating systems did not like that. I cannot get XP to boot off a RAID controller.
Isn't there anybody that has used a RAID card?

 

[giocopiano]

I have seen a cheap card from Innovision as well as others I do not recognise.

 

[techfuzz]

Most people including myself end up putting all our hard drives on the RAID controller, leaving the onboard IDE controller to deal with CDROM's, CDRW's, DVD ROM's, etc...

To get the computer to boot from an addon RAID controller card, go into the BIOS and change the boot order. There should be an boot option for either RAID or sometimes it is called "Other". The usual options being Floppy, HDD, and CDROM.

techfuzz