Cheap PCI-E RAID better than my onboard?

[ridergroov1]

Hi folks. i'm wondering in general if I bought a $50 or so RAID card if it would be better than my onboard RAID. Mobo is ASUS M4A785-M. Thanks. Just looking for RAID 0 functionality.

 

[mindless728]

for raid-0, the onboard is probably plenty

 

[ridergroov1]

ahh. really? I was hoping someone would say that the onboard sucks so I could find a way to squeeze out some more performance...

 

[sub mesa]

onboard is probably superior to the Fake-RAID drivers of simple addon controllers. Onboard also uses full-bandwidth and has lower latency. The differnce may be minimal if you use Software RAID. But if you are going to use FakeRAID/Driver RAID the onboard solutions may be superior, especially Intel onboard RAID called MatrixRAID has very good drivers.

In terms of performance, MatrixRAID is very superior if you enable the 'write caching' option, it may even beat high-end RAID controllers like Areca for RAID0 on SSDs.

 

[sub mesa]

Maybe you could download HDTune Pro and show us some benches?

Raw benchmark
Files benchmark
Random Access benchmark

Those 3 + screenshots would be nice.

 

[Telek]

YMMV but in all my research the onboard raids of new motherboards are pretty much equivalent in performance to the $150 add-on controllers (i.e. ICH10R vs Highpoint) especially if you want RAID5. You'd need to jump in price to $400+ to get dedicated controllers that beat the ICH10R significantly enough in performance to justify the upgrade.

 

[mindless728]

YMMV but in all my research the onboard raids of new motherboards are pretty much equivalent in performance to the $150 add-on controllers (i.e. ICH10R vs Highpoint) especially if you want RAID5. You'd need to jump in price to $400+ to get dedicated controllers that beat the ICH10R significantly enough in performance to justify the upgrade.

and for that price range i would recommend Adaptec