RAID0: motherboard ports vs PCIe RAID card (5-6 HDDs only. nothing more)

[mrjayviper]

is there any advantage/disadvantage (other than cost) of 1 over the other?

seems performance would be fairly equal/similar.

Thanks!

 

[H2R2P2]

Depends on the type of controller you are using. Some PCIe RAID controllers (hardware RAID) have dedicated processors and RAM installed on them which handle all the IO overhead of the drives completely independent from the rest of the system (including CPU) whereas your motherboard ports (software RAID) are going to be run by your system's resources. There are motherboards which also have dedicated IO processors and ram, but they are generally in the server market segment. RAID 0 obviously has very low resource consumption compared to RAID levels with parity, so the hardware RAID loses much of its advantages in your scenario. If your motherboard has 6 ports available on the same integrated controller, I would bet your performance would be similar to a dedicated, separate controller. Keep in mind that the vast majority of motherboards have multiple controllers to provide as many SATA ports as they do. I would not recommend a RAID 0 across different on-board controllers as they will most certainly lose sync with each other and drop your array offline. If you do in fact need 5 or 6 drives in the same array, I would get a dedicated hardware based controller.