MoBo RAID0 vs. PCI RAID0

[iso50]

I have been running three Vertex 2's on a Highpoint PCI RAID card in RAID0 for a while now and am looking to upgrade. Anybody know which of the setups below would yield the best read/writes for large files? (Mostly Photoshop swap files, usually around 65GB)

1. Two Vertex 3 120's on the motherboard's RAID0 (let's say on a Asus Maximus IV Extreme-Z)

2. Two Vertex 3 120's on a dedicated RAID0 PCI card

3. A Revodrive 3 (NOT X2, too expensive) 250GB.

I was always under the impression that the RAID capabilities built into a motherboard were in some way inferior (software assisted?) to dedicated PCI RAID cards. Is this wrong? Are some MoBo's RAID capabilities better than others?

Thanks

 

[palladin9479]

Depends on the card and mobo in question. Are we talking about PCI or PCI Express (PCIe)? SSD's will cap out a PCI card instantly, so you shouldn't be using one of those for SSD's.

Add in HBA's tend to be of higher quality in on-board ones, this isn't always true though. They also provide the added benefit of being able to migrate from one motherboard to another without needing to install MS windows.

 

[tokencode]

a descreate PCIe dedicated RAID card WITH a dedicated processor and cache will generally beat the performance on any onboard raid controller. The onbaord controllers generally offload a lot of calculations ot the CPU with RAID 5 etc. In realy world use at home, you'll be hard pressed to see th edifference though unless you run parity RAID (RAID 5, 6)

 

[groberts101]

2 x Vertex 3 MAX IOPS on that mobo will be the best bet due to the excellent Intel caching and faster incompressible write speeds(I know the data flow because I use those programs on this raided workstation.

Reads will be 1GB/s and writes will be close to 600 with incompressible data/900 with compressible data.