ON-board raid for the P4P800-D any good?

I have been reading a lot of posts talking about the onboard raid controllers not being very stable as a general rule of thumb. I am considering getting the P4P800-D for a new rig and then down the road adding a raid0 to it. Is the onboard raid worth the extra cash or should I just get the P4P800 and then get a raid controller later on?

thanks!

The P4P800 has the same ICH5R raid controller as the P4P800 Deluxe. The Deluxe has a Via Raid controller for IDE that the P4P800 doesn't. The good thing about the Deluxe is that you can have up to 10 drives and 2 Raid0 arrays whereas the non-D supports 6 drives and 1 Raid0 array.

I've had my raid0 on the ICH5R for about 1-2 months and it's fine. I played with the Via IDE raid and that worked just fine too.

-Bobby

Ah, I should have been more specific about the raid I wanted. I was thinking of adding a IDE raid in the future and setting up a raid0. I know that I should just go SATA and maybe I will but with the prices of IDE drives so low I was going to buy a second Maxtor 80gig 7200 8mb drive to match the one I already have. I have not setup a raid before so my knowledge is very limited.

It's good to have the choice of IDE or SATA raid solutions on a single board. That's the primary reason I got the Deluxe.

SATA drives are getting cheaper by the week and SATA drives on the ICH5R controller perform much better than the Via IDE controller.

Just know that all the data on your current 80gb drive will be destroyed when you set up the raid0 when you pair it with another drive.

Setting up the raid is pretty easy. It's all in the bios (ICH5R or Via) and the documentation that comes with the board is pretty good.

-Bobby

I was aware that all the data would be lost when I setup the raid, but it is good to rebild the drives every so often anyway

Thanks a lot for the feedback Bobby!