RAID card vs onboard RAID

Roll · 31 Jul 2006 at 23:01

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

Roll · 1 Aug 2006 at 07:53

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

Roll · 1 Aug 2006 at 13:38

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

So running a budget RAID 0 setup might not really be much better than running two disks in JBOD?

Roll · 2 Aug 2006 at 08:34

beh said:
What results do you get with hdtach Roll?

Just downloaded hdtach and ran the long test.

Average read was 83.5mb/s

How does this sound?

Roll · 2 Aug 2006 at 12:39

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.