• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Dedicated PCIex1 RAID controller vs. onboard RAID controller?

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

sajberTim

Registered
Joined
Mar 9, 2008
Location
No(r)way
I got two Seagate 7200.11 500Gigs and consider buying this RocketRAID 2302 controller. Currently running them in raid 0 through the onboard ATI sata300 raid controller. Can I expect any real life performance boost buying a dedicated controller like this? The Highpoint controller and my disks support NCQ but I'm not sure my onboard controller does, havn't found much info about it. Any views?
 
Generally the only time you need a stand alone raid card is when you want to offload everything off the CPU to the raid card. To do that the raid card must have hardware raid.

No real need to do that in a desktop environment. If you had to run a large database that was accessed constantly with lots of connections then you would want a stand alone raid card.
 
RAID0 and NCQ doesn't use much processing at all and NCQ isn't a benefit for most desktop users. Using an add-in card will make it easy to move the array to another PC, but you won't get any new found performance from it.
 
Back