raid controler vs on board raid control

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ZygoatD

Weaksauce
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Oct 28, 2008
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i am currently building a new system. already have the mobo. asus m4a79xtd evo. processsor amd phenom II x4 965 black edition. 8gb g-skill rip jaw series. and 2 1tb wd caviar black edition hard drives.

which brings me to my question. is there any advantage to using a stand alone raid card (software raid) vs. the on board (chipset) based raid functionality.

as i understand it both use the processor to compute everything. i think that maybe you could swap out the whole array and controller into a new mobo where as the on board solution means the array has to stay with that board. is this correct?

any other benefits from the dedicated controller?

i will be using the 2 disks in a raid 0 array.


thanks for any help.
 
Personal experience... I put together a new system using on-board raid and then my motherboard went out. Come to find out many people had problems with that motherboard, so I wasin't about to go buy the same one, but how could I be sure that the chipset would support my raid? Luckily even though it was a newer nForce, it still was able to read my raid.

So, long story short, you can pass a raid card from system build to system build (make sure you get a pci express), but if you use on-board raid you may have to rebuild the array if the newer motherboard doesn't have the same raid chipset.

I just got a PCI-E 1x internal sata x2 raid card from newegg a few months ago for like 11.00, it was low profile so it wouldn't screw in but I jerry rigged it. Love it, works great.
 
For something as simple as raid 0 buying a dedicated card won't help. People typically buy dedicated cards to do raid 5/6/50/60 because those involve calculating parity bits which are not used in striping and mirroring. The only benefit a card would give you for raid 0 or 1 would be if you got a really high end one with onboard cache which would make writes appear to be much faster but in reality they are just cached while the controller waits for the disk to write the data.
 
For a RAID 0 setup, no real need whatsoever for a dedicated RAID controller. You can generally move a RAID 0/1 array from one mobo to another as long as the motherboard southbridges are part of the same family (SB710 to SB 750, SB 750 to SB 750, P965 to P45, etc).
 
Danny Bui said:
For a RAID 0 setup, no real need whatsoever for a dedicated RAID controller. You can generally move a RAID 0/1 array from one mobo to another as long as the motherboard southbridges are part of the same family (SB710 to SB 750, SB 750 to SB 750, P965 to P45, etc).
Click to expand...

This...

I've got an Asus Striker Extreme with twin Seagates in Raid 0 mirrored for a long time now, and have never had any issues. Save your money!
 
thanks guys! that's what i thought. glad to save the money and spend it on other parts. but since this is only my second array i thought i would double check.


thanks again.
 
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