Onboard Raid..... any good?

Hi
I'll be buying an Asus A8N-E
I was wondering if the onboard Raid chips are any good?
I would like to mirror two SATA drives (primary array for OS and daily use stuff). I also want to use the PC for games... should I add a single HD (third SATA drive) for that? Is there a big performance difference?

Thanks

It works alright. It just uses more cpu then a controller card. There's virtually no performance gain for games. Load times may be a hair faster but not by much. The main advantage is redundancy.

So, it would make sense to have a primary Array with small disks for the OS and a secondary array that is bigger for storage and games. Like two 40 gigs for the primary and two 250's for the secondary?

Onboard RAID is a total waste of time. Almost all consumer level RAID controllers offload their striping/parity calculations onto the CPU anyway which begs the question, what the hell are they for anyway?

If you want RAID and you can't afford to shell out on a true hardware controller, then do it in software. Windows and Linux both do this with ease and you have the advantage that if your hardware dies, just move your disks to another machine and carry on as before. If a dedicated 'hardware' controller craps out, then you have to get hold of a motherboard with the exact same chip before you will see your data again.

I,m using the Nvidia raid controller with 2 raptor drives in raid 0,it is very fast and very stable. I havn't had any problems with the controller at all and it performs very well. I highly recomend it.

leathered said:

Windows and Linux both do this with ease and you have the advantage that if your hardware dies, just move your disks to another machine and carry on as before. If a dedicated 'hardware' controller craps out, then you have to get hold of a motherboard with the exact same chip before you will see your data again.

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Thats sounds interesting, what is the feature called? I guess it's only in Winpro?

That does depend on what raid level you're running of course. I don't bother with striping, but I'm a big fan of Raid-1.
Onboard raid is quite nice for mirroring. First, mirroring hardly takes any CPU time at all. Software generally does a pretty good job of it, aside from a couple of catches. First, Windows XP and Windows 2000 pro don't do mirroring in software. And yes, it is really, really lame since they do support striping and mirroring is even easier to implement. A simple, cheap, onboard controller takes care of this little nuisance. While Linux, Solaris, presumably BSD, etc. can do software mirroring, some sort of controller that makes the bios understand raid is still nicer. If a mirrored boot disk dies, you'll have to jump through a few hoops to boot off the mirror. If you've got a controller the system can just boot up.

Well, in order to have two mirrored (RAID1) SATAll arrays, I assume I need a 4 channel card?
Adaptec 1420SA (ca.$109) is probly the cheapest way to go, I don't know about those other exotic brands. Do does cards mirror everything, MBS included?

Talisker said:

I don't know about those other exotic brands. Do does cards mirror everything, MBS included?

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Yes, they mirror everything. Well, normally at least. I'm not expert myself, but 3ware is quite good for PATA and SATA raid cards, so add them to your list of candidates.

zandor said:

First, Windows XP and Windows 2000 pro don't do mirroring in software.

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Sorry, I should have pointed out that you have to do a hack to get software RAID1 & 5 in Windows XP/2000 Pro. Google is your friend.

leathered said:

Sorry, I should have pointed out that you have to do a hack to get software RAID1 & 5 in Windows XP/2000 Pro. Google is your friend.

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Have to look into that, thanks for the info....