PCI RAID card vs onboard RAID

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Soldato
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20 Apr 2004
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Just wondered what difference there would be in using a PCI RAID card (running 2 SATA drives in RAID 0) rather than the motherboards onboard RAID controller?

I would imagine using a RAID card might reduce the load on the CPU slightly, but would there be any significant changes to transfer rates?

Thanks for any replies :)
 
RAID0 requires very little processing power, the data just gets split into the appropriate sized chunks and directed to the right disk.

A PCI card could struggle to cope with a pair of quick disks, SATAII disks will burst 250MB/s+ and in RAID0 the sustained transfer rate can be upwards of 150MB/s. The PCI bus is limited to 133MB/s whereas a mobo controller will be connected directly onto the main system bus and hence won't be limited to anywhere near the same extent.
 
Thanks for the reply.

I'd only be using SATA 1 drives (150MB/S) so I guess that the PCI bus would be able to handle this.

I wanted to go this way so I could connect a second RAID pair of disks and wondered if there would be any performance differences.
 
rpstewart said:
The PCI bus is limited to 133MB/s whereas a mobo controller will be connected directly onto the main system bus and hence won't be limited to anywhere near the same extent.
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I've recently ordered a Highpoint RocketRAID SATA PCI-X 1820A card, and I'm only going to be using it on PCI for now, as my motherboard doesn't have PCI-X. How much faster would it be with a PCI-X motherboard? I'm gonna be using a 4 disk raid 5 array. :)
 
I'll be using 320gb Seagate 7200.10's. It's gonna be a fileserver, so the network is gonna be the mail bottleneck for now. If I do upgrade to a PCI-X motherboard, then it will be nice to have the extra speed. :cool:
 
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