On-board SATA

[maddude]

I've been reading some threads on here and have noticed people saying don't use on-board sata, use an add-on card. Is there a reason for this? I never head anything about on-board SATA being slow, or unreliable.

So yeah, I just wanted to know if on-board SATA is fine to use with simple RAID 1 or RAID 0, or if I need to get an add-on card.

 

[StorageJoe]

I have never had a problem with on-board SATA. The only think I would steer clear of is onboard RAID 5. That is more of personal preference than anything else. I used the onboard SATA for my boot drive and an LSI MegaRAID SATA card for my storage.

 

[drizzt81]

I've been reading some threads on here and have noticed people saying don't use on-board sata, use an add-on card. Is there a reason for this? I never head anything about on-board SATA being slow, or unreliable.

So yeah, I just wanted to know if on-board SATA is fine to use with simple RAID 1 or RAID 0, or if I need to get an add-on card.

Usually people only suggest add-in cards for users that

• are planning to run RAID-5 and wish to have higher performance
• Are planning to run an OS independent RAID-5 and want protability
• want more SATA ports than their board is offering

There is nothing wrong with using on-board SATA ports. In case of southbridge/ northbridge attached SATA ports, this is generally a really good idea, since they have a lot of bandwidth available.

 

[unhappy_mage]

Agreed. Onboard sata ports are usually implemented in the northbridge, or via pci-express. It used to be the case that you'd see some sata ports on plain PCI, but these days there's a lot of internal bandwidth to throw around, so the bottlenecks are less common. That means onboard sata ports are usually well-implemented.

More complex raid levels like 5, 6, or 1+0 are often not implemented, or implemented poorly, on onboard controllers. Almost always, offboard solutions are the only way to get hardware raid of any sort. The only exception I can think of, in fact, is Adaptec's ZCR concept, which has an offboard processor doing the RAID functionality for onboard SCSI, SAS, and SATA ports. I don't know of a motherboard that actually does raid in hardware - the added cost is too high, and not enough users want the functionality to make it worthwhile.