XFX Revo64 (Is a hardware card necessary?)

[Phil99]

Has anyone got one of these or have any experience using one? I'm looking at the 3 port version to run 2 disks in RAID1. Looking at this card in particular as it's roughly £30 and seems to be fully hardware based. The alternative is a Sil3114 generic card for about £15 which is a software based card - will I notice much of a difference between the two in terms of reliability or speed?

The disks in question will likely either be WD or Seagate 250 or 320GB.

Alternatively are there any good cards that will do RAID5 on either IDE or SATA at a reasonable price? (The Revo only seems to do RAID0/1/3)

 

[rpstewart]

You don't need any form of hardware support for RAID1, it just writes the same stuff to both disks.

If you want to do RAID5 then you're looking at either the Highpoint RocketRaid cards which are "accelerated software" rather than true hardware for about £90 for 4 ports or £160 for 8. If you want true hardware RAID5 then your into £300+ for cards from Areca, Broadcomm etc.