Standalone RAID or Mobo?

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Kusanhagi

Weaksauce
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Working on specs for a customer's ultimate gaming rig. He is going to have two 500GB SSD in RAID0 and I have been pondering this question... (which I can find no real world answer to)

Is a dedicated RAID card with hardware RAID0 going to outperform the mobo RAID controller in gaming and Photoshop?

Games played are things like World of Warcraft which benefits more from better access speed than games like Battlefield.


Informed opinions would be most welcome.
 
Depending what you want to achieve.

Dedicated (relatively cheap) Raid0 cards, outperform any mobo based raid system due to the DMI interconnect being the system bottleneck.

3 fast SSDs usually saturate the DMI interconnect which needs to supply data for all the USB, LAN and SATA ports on the mobo (generally speaking).

2 SSDs are within the capabilities of the DMI, so you can go ahead with your config.
If you want higher perf, go PCI Express (I use multiple LSI 9207-8i with 4.2 GB/s each, or Adaptec 71605E with 6.6 GB/s)

You can't have enough SSDs :)
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Am I right to assume that the $100 cards aren't true hardware RAID? Or what makes the $700 cards better?
 
A true hardware RAID card includes a processor for parity calculation and onboard RAM for stripe caching. And it has the option to be connected to a battery backup unit (BBU) to retain inflight stripes during power loss and do proper write caching.

Obviously RAID0 does not need parity calculations. The cache will only help with heavy random write operations. I would say a normal HBA type card like the LSI 9207-8i is enough for RAID0, and with only two drives not needed. The Intel onboard RAID is pretty good for that case. Also note that only the Intel onboard RAID will support TRIM, which is beneficial for most SSDs without overprovisioning.

As always, the exact answer depends on the use case and if it is just a gaming computer a hardware RAID controller will not be worth it. Can you specify the exact type of the SSDs? Because that will influence the performance more than the controller.
 
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I say for that purpose just go with the on-board RAID setup. I don't think the juice will be worth the squeeze for a dedicated card.
 
I appreciate as always the technical wisdom of this site.
The dual Samsung 840 Pro 500gb drives should do fine on the on board RAID0.
Thanks again all.
 
the most critical component is a dedicated bus to hide xor traffic from the host

that's for parity raids

batt does not make a lot of a sense with a 2+ clustered storage hosts

also modern logical volume managers like the one inside zfs and microsoft clustered storage spaces do raid job in a software much better then any hardware controller can do

omniscence said:
A true hardware RAID card includes a processor for parity calculation and onboard RAM for stripe caching. And it has the option to be connected to a battery backup unit (BBU) to retain inflight stripes during power loss and do proper write caching.

Obviously RAID0 does not need parity calculations. The cache will only help with heavy random write operations. I would say a normal HBA type card like the LSI 9207-8i is enough for RAID0, and with only two drives not needed. The Intel onboard RAID is pretty good for that case. Also note that only the Intel onboard RAID will support TRIM, which is beneficial for most SSDs without overprovisioning.

As always, the exact answer depends on the use case and if it is just a gaming computer a hardware RAID controller will not be worth it. Can you specify the exact type of the SSDs? Because that will influence the performance more than the controller.
Click to expand...
 
For 2 SSDs, the onboard is fine. I have even run 3 SSDs in RAID onboard with few issues in performance. For most applications, especially gaming, you aren't going to really notice the difference between a dedicated RAID card and the onboard RAID. Now, if he is planning on doing any kind of file/sharing, media streaming, etc from the system, and you are going to incorporate more drives, then it might have an impact. But I never use my gaming setup for those kind of operations anyway, it uses too much power when running and I don't like the performance drop in my games from extra operations running in the background.
 
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