What are your opinions on Onboard RAID chips?

[KangGax331]

Personally, I don't care about any levels other than RAID 0.

I'm thinking that they would be slower than a PCI card, and use more of the CPU. Am I right or completely wrong?

Thank you for your input.

 

[Viper96720]

Cpu usage varies the pci version of raid cards often uses the same chip as on board. So I say the difference is negible

 

[orion7144]

I haven't noticed any difference between the onboard and the PCI card. I did notice a differance between Highpoint and Promis onboard RAID. The highpoint has more options and the Promis is usually a light version (at least on the soyo and gigabyte boards that I have tested.)

 

[Jeff7]

The onboard Highpoint RAID on my Shuttle AK35GTR didn't like me overclocking at all - gave me all sorts of BSOD's on an otherwise stable system. It seems to be running just fine at default speeds. I haven't really done any benchmarks though.

 

[Peter]

Performance wise, it makes no difference - on standard commodity chipsets, there's only one PCI bus, so onboard chips connect to the same PCI bus as cards do.

Drawbacks of Onboard are (1) when you upgrade mainboard, you can't keep your controller, and (2) you can't use BIOS updates from the controller maker straight away, you need to wait for the mainboard maker to include a newer controller BIOS into the main system BIOS.

The former is about money and possibly having to reinstall your OS after the update (in case you can't buy the exact same controller anymore, which, in case of IDE is quite likely) ... and the latter proves to be a major annoyance especially with IDE controllers, the rate at which BIOS updates for those appear is still quite amazing.

 

[DieHardware]

I put my CD/DVD drives on my IDE PCI card channels and the HDDs on the motherboard's IDE channels(I don't use RAID), to take advantage of their higher bandwidth(modern chipsets not running through the PCI bus).

Downside...depending on the flexibility of the MB's boot order you might or might not be able to boot off the optical drives. My $0.02