RAID0 reliability on ASUS P8Z68-V PRO vs ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3

[KamalS]

I am stuck on deciding between ASUS P8Z68-V PRO vs ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3.

Fry's does not stock ASRock and Microcenter is OOS on the ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3. I would prefer buying the CPU and MB from them rather than NewEgg(ease of replacement).

Four questions:

1. As I will not be buying a separate RAID card, I was wondering how reliabile is the onboard RAID on ASUS P8Z68-V PRO vs ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3?

I am not interested very much in the performance deviations between the two boards, but reliability under RAID 0 is very important.

The HDD I will be using are a pair of the $60 SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache (are the Hitachi 1TB better?)

These drives will have 4+ OS and programs and hence, I guess read performance is more critical.

However, I do not want to be busy rebuilding RAID volumes every few months, unless the HDD itself is at fault (I don't want the point of failure to be the onboard controller)

To summarize, my question is: which onboard RAID is more of a toy controller?

2. I don't recollect which, but one of these MBs have a limitation of not being able to use SRT when RAID is being used.

Which one is it?

3. In your experience, is the MTTF of 64GB SSDs comparable to the MTTF of the RAID 0 volume I would have on the chosen MB, or are the SSDs better in reliability?

4. What was that site that shows you the price of your components from various vendors. I am not talking about pricewatch.

 

[mfenn]

1. They have the same Intel chipset, so the RAID is exactly the same between the two. However "reliable" and "RAID0" should never be mentioned in the same sentence.

2. I've read conflicting reports as to whether or not you can use SRT to cache a RAID0 array or not. In any case, both motherboards use the same SRT software so the limitation would exist or not exist in both.

3. SSDs are more reliable as long as you pick one with solid firmware like Intel or Crucial.

4. pcpartpicker.com . It is not 100% reliable though. I've seen it miss lots of stuff.

 

[KamalS]

1. They have the same Intel chipset, so the RAID is exactly the same between the two. However "reliable" and "RAID0" should never be mentioned in the same sentence.

I agree.

So the MB acts like a breakout board for the chipset as far as RAID is concerned?

Heard very bad things about Intel chipset RAID - would the effort in doing a RAID0 be worth it then, or should I wait a few months and buy a SSD instead?

3. SSDs are more reliable as long as you pick one with solid firmware like Intel or Crucial.

Do these average more than a year of constant use?

4. pcpartpicker.com . It is not 100% reliable though. I've seen it miss lots of stuff.

I can see. Everything there costs more than what I paid so far, even not considering rebates.

They seem to pull mostly from newegg

 

[Ken g6]

are the Hitachi 1TB better?

[post=32414497]Yes[/post].

Do these average more than a year of constant use?

Define "constant use". Constantly on? Yes. Constantly reading from the disk? Probably. Constantly writing to the disk? Probably not. SSDs are rated on write cycles.

I use a Firefox plugin called InvisibleHand to find the lowest price. It's not 100% reliable either. Sometimes it thinks one part is the same as a completely different part.

 

[mfenn]

I agree.

So the MB acts like a breakout board for the chipset as far as RAID is concerned?

Essentially, yes. Obviously you could have a physical issue with a port, but that would affect any use of the port, not just RAID.

Heard very bad things about Intel chipset RAID - would the effort in doing a RAID0 be worth it then, or should I wait a few months and buy a SSD instead?

No, I don't think that it is worth it now that SSDs are out. An SSD is about 10 times the performance of a two drive RAID0.

Do these average more than a year of constant use?

Like Ken said, it depends on your workload. Anand ran some numbers and found that a good SSD controller (Intel, Crucial, Sandforce, Samsung) would last approximately 8 years under his workload. As you might imagine, he is a power user.