Onboard SATA RAID vs SATA RAID PCI Controller

[swooka]

I been googling around.. trying to get some more insight on this.. but I really couldn't...

I'm very familiar with SATA RAID and working with SATA RAID cards like the PERC6 on the Dell Poweredge servers... etc..

but this questions is really about my home system... this weekend I want to "redo it"

I have two Seagate 250gb SATA HDs.. I want to do RAID 1 (mirror)..

Now I have an Intel Mobo.. I think its model D865GBF... i'm pretty sure the on board can do SATA RAID 1...

but I want something rock solid.... Should I use onboard.. or buy a card like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816116030


if not the 3ware.. which one is better... I was originally gonna do just onboard.. but I heard all sorts of horror stories about onboard raid...


I guess I am just looking for someone to set the story straight.. and maybe point me in the right direction.. maybe to even suggest a pretty good sata raid card...


thanks in advance..

 

[Codesmith]

Good cards is going to have its own RAM, if it doesn't have its own RAM then its no better than your onboard RAID. Good cards are expensive.

Personally I don't think buying a good card is worthwhile unless you are doing RAID 5.

Don't worry to much about onboard RAID horror stories, they mostly deal with RAID 0.

If you are concerned I would play arround with the array. Pull a single drive out and connect it to another PC and see if it has any problems reading it as a single drive. Start with one drive disconnected and then practice recreating the array without reinitializing it (initializing = erasing). Simulate a drive failure and rebuild the array from the existing drive. See what it takes for you to actually lose data.

My (limitted) experience with 2 drive RAID 1 arrays has been that the worse case senario is that you are left with 2 working drives each a complete copy of all your data which you can readily convert back to a RAID 1 array without data loss.