PCI Raid as fast as mobo RAID?

[Mac42]

One of the pins broke off my mobo's secondary IDE connector, and since I didn't get the RAID option (no idea why) I can only use 2 drives now. I'm fairly new to the whole RAID thing, so I have a few questions.

Over at pricewatch I've seen RAID controllers for as low as $21, but are these going to give the same performance (RAID 0) and a built-in RAID controller? I know with PCI you're limited by the 33Mhz PCI bus, but I'm not sure about harddrives.

Also, I've seen that the new via Southbridge has increased the bandwidth (to 533MB/s I think?)... would that increase the speeds of built-in RAID controllers (assuming you have the latest/greatest IDE drives) or do they not require that much bandwidth.

[Nico3k]

there are 2 different types of raid... hardware, and software raid. what most people have is software raid (thats the one that comes with motherboards and you mostly see sold as PCI cards). the difference between the two is that hardware raid uses its own processor for the raid, while software raid uses your processor. i find the hardware raid controllers way to expensive (300$ +). the good thing is that now adays most software raid configurations are faster than hardware raid configs because the processors have gotten so fast. if you raise your fsb, it will also run the PCI at a higher rate, so the software raid will run faster too (but i dont reccomend it since many pci raid cards get angry when theyre overclocked). the ones you see on pricewatch are probably not what your looking for. a good software raid card is from 70-150$

i hope that helped

[WyrmMaster]

Shouldnt make any difference, the IDE controller runs on the PCI bus, along with the PCI cards. The all run at 33mhz.

[MospeadasDark]

Originally posted by WyrmMaster
Shouldnt make any difference, the IDE controller runs on the PCI bus, along with the PCI cards. The all run at 33mhz.

What about the 66/64bit slots? They run on a seperate bus, don't they?

[Jon]

Originally posted by MospeadasDark


What about the 66/64bit slots? They run on a seperate bus, don't they?

Yep, but with the ATA bandwidth throttled at current ATA100 and ATA133 speeds, it's not going to matter much unless you get one of those expensive, multichanneled RAID controllers that can put out the kind of throughput a 64/66 slot can handle. Not very feasible considering it would take more than a dozen IDE channels with a couple of drives to each...and you would still have plenty of headroom. SCSI would be a much better option well before you reached that point.

[Mac42]

Originally posted by Nico3k
...a good software raid card is from 70-150$...


Any suggestions? Are the cheap ones just low quality?

[Jon]

If just using RAID 0 with to drives you will get very similar performance out of a cheap card. The more expensive ones normally have onboard processing and integrated cache instead of using system resources to supplement this in a cheaper card. The onboard processors and cache are normally more suited for redundant arrays using methods such as RAID 5, though.

You won't lose much by using a cheap card. The onboard HPT controllers are basically the same thing...cheap software RAID controllers.