RAID - mobo or windows?

[cats_five]

Following the failure of a disk and the lose of a small amount of data (all the important stuff is safe on the NAS) I've bitten the bullet and ordered two disks of the same size and I'll mirror it all.

I'm leaning towards doing the mirroring with windows. The mobo (Gigabyte GAFM2A85XM) supports raid, but I found the following reasons to do it with Windows that struck me as having some weight:

1. performance will be very similar with either method - and the new disks are the new faster SATA so I suspect I'll notice the difference
2. doing it with Windows means I have a nice GUI interface to do it with
3. I can take either of the disks, put them in another machine and have a working HDD with the data accessible.
4. If I had to change the mobo a different chipset might not be able to read the mirrors.

Any good reason(s) to change my mind and do it via the hardware?

 

[Mercutio]

Even the semi-hardware raid you get from the onboard controllers is (probably) a bit quicker/more reliable than windows. Going the software route adds an extra layer to the process of accessing etc. The onboard still uses your CPU for access but it's at more of a driver level than an application one.

For the onboards from intel you still get a bit of UI (intel rapid storage manager) and every intel controlled raid is compatible with every other (so intel series 6 mainboards with onboard raid will be able to read raid arrays from later series etc).

The best option (imo) is a cheap hardware raid card (like the one in my sig). It's about... £70 total and you have a proper hardware cache (backed by a battery etc). For a straight raid-1 mirror though I don't think you'll see much difference.

 

[X3T]

I'm using the software RAID in Windows 7/8, and it's running fine. The reason I chose this method over the onboard RAID was because something strange happened when I added an SSD (not part of the array.)

Using the onboard RAID caused my SSD to run at about half speed, but the array ran fine. Changing to software RAID fixed the problem, and the performance of the array was identical in the benchmarks I used.

This may be just a 'bug' in my mobo, but newer BIOSs haven't fixed it.

Of course it doesn't look like you are using an SSD, but it's something to bear in mind if you do add one in the future.

 

[Clav]

Software raid being 'slower' is a load of tosh as well. It was true when CPU's were measured in Mhz but not on modern systems. If you will only be using your array within a windows environment then the built in windows raid is fine. I've been using it in multiple Pc's for several years with no issues.