RAID card vs onboard RAID

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Just a quick question.

I'm using 2 x 120GB SATA drives running in RAID 0 through a PCI add on card as my motherboard doesn't support RAID. The card has the Silicon Image 3112 chip.

As the speed of the data transfer is dependant on the bandwidth of the PCI card I wondered if this is causing a bottleneck and whether there would be a speed increase if I upgraded to a motherboard with onboard RAID?

Thanks for replies :)
 
From memory the PCI bus will most likely be enough for desktop RAID systems so you shouldn't see any significant performance bottlenecks unless your RAID array is pretty substantial.

SiriusB
 
You might find an increase through the fact that you will probably also need a new CPU etc because I haven't seen many relatively new systems without some form of Raid but as SiriusB says a simple change of motherboard is unlikely to offer much of an increase if any.
 
Thanks for the replies.

The RAID card seems fairly fast anyway so I think I'll stick with it for the time being until my next planned upgrade :)
 
Seriously, on-board RAID controllers, cheap add-in cards, software RAID - you aren't really going to see that much difference between the three.
Marginal changes in CPU over-head, performance etc.

It isn't until you pay the serious money for the real RAID controllers with their own CPU's, controllers, memory etc that you really start to see any major performance increases.
There is a reason why £300+ SATA RAID controllers exist :)
 
stoofa said:
Seriously, on-board RAID controllers, cheap add-in cards, software RAID - you aren't really going to see that much difference between the three.
Marginal changes in CPU over-head, performance etc.

It isn't until you pay the serious money for the real RAID controllers with their own CPU's, controllers, memory etc that you really start to see any major performance increases.
There is a reason why £300+ SATA RAID controllers exist :)
Click to expand...

So running a budget RAID 0 setup might not really be much better than running two disks in JBOD?
 
What results do you get with hdtach Roll? That might make it more clear. Although as SiriusB says, with just 2 drives in RAID 0 I don't think the pci bus would be much of a bottleneck if at all.

I'm wondering ... with so many people having powerful dual core cpus is processing overhead much of an issue anymore using software RAID?
 
btw RAID 0 is not the same as JBOD.

There is an advantage to a PCI RAID setup: if you change motherboards then you don't need to rebuild your RAID array and therefore backup/restore everything. With onboard RAID you'd need to buy another motherboard with the same controller chip.
 
Not sure how that compares with other RAID 0 setups but given pci peaks at ~133mb/s it sounds fine in terms of your initial question.
 
I should have said that the drives are 2 x 120GB Western Digital SATA 8MB cache.

I think I remember reading somewhere that these are not the fastest compared to similar Seagate/Maxtor/Samsung drives.
 
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