SATA III RAID Controller or Mobo

[daveyj66]

Hello,

I have an Asus P6t SE mobo core i7 920 overclocked, 12gb RAM, with a 60gb SSD running win7 and two x 1Tb HDD's in RAID1 for data.

One of the HDD's has failed and I have bought 2 x 2Tb Seagate Barracuda Green SATA III drives to replace the 2 x 1Tb ones as I could do with more space.

On the mobo there are 6 x SATA connections but and all are used.

My question is this;
Will I see any performance improvement by buying an SATA III PCI RAID controller card and installing the new drives to that in RAID1 rather than the mobo connections that are SATA II?

In doing so I get to free up a couple SATA connections meaning I can re-use the functioning 1tb drive as an additional backup drive but this alone is not worth the bother/cost of buying a RAID controller, it would have to be faster by taking advantage of the fact that the Seagates are SATA III drives capable of 6Gbps transfer rate. Any point at all?

Thanks

Jonathan

 

[Chainzsaw]

A regular HDD cannot saturate a SATA 2 connection (which tops out at 300MB/s). Most HDD's can only muster about 150MB/s reads, and that is only burst.

You will not see an imporvement with a SATA 3 RAID controller for your HDD's.

Plus you need an expensive RAID card to get maximum performance, of which i'm doubting your willing to spend over 700 bucks on just a RAID card.

 

[Branden]

not really, the harddrive is it's own bottleneck, not the sata port. just because a HDD has a sata III interface it doesn't mean it's even coming close to utilizing it. mechanical harddrives are barely even reaching the limits of sata I. there is no essentially no difference between plugging a sata III mechanical HDD into a sata I or II or III port.
a dedicated RAID controller is unnecessary for RAID1, only consider RAID controller if you're looking at RAID5/6 or want scalability.

 

[daveyj66]

Thanks for the help, sorry my post seems to have been duplicated due to a dodgy mobile internet connection!

Regards

Jonathan