What are the odds I used the wrong RAID 0 Controller?

[brownbat]

I'm in Windows 7, have a couple 40g Intel SSDs, Intel i5-750 processor, and an ASUS P7P55D PRO LGA 1156 mobo.

I've never set up a RAID before, but it seemed easy to do through the BIOS, so I set up RAID 0 there.

Now I notice rozar's comment* that BIOS managed RAIDs are maybe far less efficient than processor managed RAID setups, and I'm wondering if I did this wrong, and should have set this up through Windows somehow.

Is that correct? If I messed this up, how bad off am I?


* http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/246711-32-raid-drive-existing-setup#t1750186

 

[brownbat]

Oh, RAID 0, btw.

(Sorry!)

 

[jitpublisher]

No, that is not what he meant. For your uses, what you did it is fine. He is referring to using a dedicated 3rd party controller card, which is the best way to go. But a third party card that is better than your onboard controller is costly. The Windows based software RAID is bottom of the barrel, and should only be used for.....well I am not really sure what one would use it for, it is completley worthless as far as performance or enthusiast use goes.

 

[palladin9479]

RAID-0 will see little acceleration from a host controller other then the dedicated memory used for caching. Where the dedicated card comes into play is for RAID-5 setups. Every block needs an XOR operation done on the bits involved to generate the parity bit used for redundancy. This ends up being tons of I/O transactions from your CPU across the bus to your HDD and back again. Modern CPU's are easily strong enough to do the math but the path between the CPU and the HDD is so long and without drive side write cache that writes take a severe performance penalty. A dedicated HBA with an on board XOR processor does all this locally at the drives level which makes RAID5 comparable to other levels for performance.

 

[brownbat]

Best answer selected by brownbat.

 

[brownbat]

Thank you both, the additional info was very informative, palladin.