Dedicated RAID card worth it?

[RamGuy]

Hi,

I've just started putting together my new rigg, it consists of the Asus Rampage II Extreme (couldn't wait for the Foxconn BloodRage or DFI LanParty UT X58 any longer)

I'm going to run 3x VelociRaptor 150GB in RAID0 (was thinking about a Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 146GB on the BloodRage, but figured that the Cheetah is simply too expensive compared to the Raptor? I can almost get myself 3x Raptors for the price of 1x Cheetah 15K.6 146GB, if I wanted to go 2x Cheetah that equals almost 4x VelociRaptors!

And there is no way 2x Cheetah's will beat 4x VelociRaptors? Besides of the lower access times the VelociRaptor would have gotten higher read / write speeds, right?

Now I'm wondering if my RAID0 configuration might get limited by the ICH10R southbridge on the Rampage II Extreme? The Intel RAID controllers are fairly good compared to other controllers from Marvell, JMicron etc.. But still I guess it might limit a bit? What about the CPU Utilization?

I'm also wondering how well it will handle both a 3-RAID0 VelociRaptor and 2-RAID0 Western Digital Black 500GB? That will be a lot of bandwidth for it to handle at once?

 

[longblock454]

What is the purpose? The performance your talking about is in the neighbourhood of transactional DBs?

RAID0 has next to no overhead, you can probably achieve your goal with the onboard controller and Raptors easy.

 

[epimetheus]

I'm running 3 WD6400AAKS in RAID0 on an ICH10R in my gaming rig and I couldn't be happier. I short-stoked them for the OS partition. My setup is limited by the drives themselves, not the chipset, granted those are just Blue drives. My next experiment is a couple of WD Blacks in RAID0. VR's are too expensive for me when I can get almost as good performance much cheaper, and have the storage to go along with it.