Hardware RAID card or onboard controller?

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USMCGrunt

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I have an Adaptec 3805 hardware RAID controller available to me and was wondering if it would be of any benefit to use it over the built-in storage controller on my ASUS Z97 Mk II motherboard? I don't have any immediate intentions of using a RAID array, just curious if it would be beneficial at all.

EDIT: Disregard, I just remembered it's only a SATA II Interface card vs the motherboard's SATA III interface.
 
If you plan on setting up a raid array... use the hardware controller card it will be much faster.
 
A hardware raid controller is only faster if it has bbwc, without it, there is no speed increase as your still waiting on the disks either way.

SATA2 vs SATA3 won't make a difference at all, unless your taking about pure bandwidth speeds from raiding multible ssd's that are fast enough.
 
patrickdk said:
A hardware raid controller is only faster if it has bbwc, without it, there is no speed increase as your still waiting on the disks either way.

SATA2 vs SATA3 won't make a difference at all, unless your taking about pure bandwidth speeds from raiding multible ssd's that are fast enough.
Click to expand...

BBWC?
 
USMCGrunt said:
BBWC?
Click to expand...

Battery-backed write cache. It's a small, larger than cell phone sized, battery + cache that holds and writes data to your array in case there is a sudden power loss or trip. Mainly you will see a performance increase with a large cache, and a dedicated asic for parity. If you are not using parity driven RAID it will be less speed improvement. The cache will still help, especially with short bursts of writes primarily.
 
This one has 128MB of RAM onboard which I would assume is for cache but I don't have the optional battery module on it.
 
USMCGrunt said:
This one has 128MB of RAM onboard which I would assume is for cache but I don't have the optional battery module on it.
Click to expand...
I doubt you would get that much better performance from that particular RAID card.
You'd probably be better off with IRST and RAID 0.
That's a "weak" RAID card..
You'd need something with @ least 512 mb of cache to have a worthwhile gain.
You don't really have to have the BBU...unless it's mission-critical.
 
schmuckley said:
I doubt you would get that much better performance from that particular RAID card.
You'd probably be better off with IRST and RAID 0.
That's a "weak" RAID card..
You'd need something with @ least 512 mb of cache to have a worthwhile gain.
You don't really have to have the BBU...unless it's mission-critical.
Click to expand...

heh, this came off a production server that's getting scrapped after an upgrade. Its funny cause even on the surface, the company that put these machines together did a shitty job.
 
That controller can have a BBU added to it; was right there in the product specs ;)

Adaptec Battery Module ABM-800 (2248000-R)

BTW, most Adaptec cards don't use these battery modules anymore as they've switched to SuperCaps. One of the big advantages of the SC vs the traditional battery cell is that you don't need to worry about replacing the battery cell every 2-3 years on the account of them swelling up. IIRC Adaptec considers the battery to be a 1yr replacement item... but they never made a big point of that!
 
schmuckley said:
I doubt you would get that much better performance from that particular RAID card.
You'd probably be better off with IRST and RAID 0.
Click to expand...

Intel will beat just about any hardware RAID card at simple RAID levels such as 0, 1, 10. It will probably be by a significant amount, even.

I had an external version of this card, the 3085, years ago. It was unreliable and repeatedly failed my array for no reason (I later used the same exact disks on a couple different LSI controllers which were not nearly as problematic). I had to buy and learn to use R-Studio to recover data because of that card. I am glad to be rid of the 3085.
 
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And if you are primarily interested in read speeds, those can basically only be boosted by using faster devices (like SSDs) or by adding a SSD cache if the devices are only HDDs.
 
Onboard Intel for non-parity RAID. RAID card for all other parity RAID types.
/thread
 
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