Will I see significant difference between onboard RAID and dedicated?

[yegor]

My old mobo just died (Asus Formula).... so Im shopping for a new setup. I decided to go with the Intel DX58SO mobo. My old mobo used the ICH9. If plug in the drives into the new board, with a ICH10R.... will I be able to read the data? It was a RAID5 array.

Secondly, will a raid controller, such as 3WARE 9650SE offer a significant boost in performance over onboard raid? If so... I plan to get 2 X-25M 80GB drives and put them in RAID0 for OS, and then use the regular 4 drives I have in RAID5 for data. The problem is... the raid card is only 4 ports.... which would all go towards the RAID5 array, so I would have to use the onboard RAID for the SSDs. Is it worth spending an extra $300 on a 8port RAID card, and running both arrays off it?

 

[wuzy]

f plug in the drives into the new board, with a ICH10R.... will I be able to read the data? It was a RAID5 array.

Yes. You just need to make sure SATA mode is set to "RAID" in BIOS and install Intel Matrix RAID driver&software in order to get the array to become readable again.

Secondly, will a raid controller, such as 3WARE 9650SE offer a significant boost in performance over onboard raid?

Depends on what you use it for. For RAID0, not so much (not enough to be noticeable anyway). While for RAID5 you will notice hugely increased write speed, but only if you utilise this increased potential frequently.

 

[photonboy]

You haven't specified the system usage.

SATA2 inteface is max 300MB/sec which is slower than 2xSSD in RAID0 if it's a good one.

If I were you I'd get a single OCZ Vertex 120GB. Check out the reviews.

 

[sub mesa]

connect your SSDs to your chipset controller; its a waste connecting those to hardware RAID; it will slow them down. Even Areca slows SSDs down eventually.

 

[yegor]

I will be using it for video rendering, and downloading at high speed.

 

[Andhrimnir]

^ correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the limiting factor something other than drive speed there? Like for rendering it's usually processing power and for DLing it's just your bandwidth (unless you have ungodly high speed internet and your drives ARE what's slowing you - in that case *epic bout of jealousy*)

 

[jitpublisher]

^That is exactly what I was thinking, fast hard drives/RAID, SSD's, none of this will amount to a hill of beans difference for the OP is doing.

 

[sub mesa]

And even if the I/O stream was big, it would be sequential. Meaning a good group of 1TB 5400rpm disks will be able to handle it just fine.

But as i understand the OP correctly, he wants the SSDs for his OS and use 4 disks in RAID5 for the data storage. That would be a reasonable setup.