Raid Card worth it?

[ajhockey3]

Hi guys, Normally I help and give people advice but today I need some advice myself.
I have two WD Blue 1TB HDD's in raid 0. (I know its risky but i have a nightly backup server)
I use the on board raid (on board raid card by AMD) Is it worth upgrading to a dedicated PCI E raid card? And If I did do you loose data?

 

[mcnumpty23]

cant see how it would make a difference on board or raid card with 2 drives in raid 0 theres no redundancy

 

[sna]

Hi guys, Normally I help and give people advice but today I need some advice myself.
I have two WD Blue 1TB HDD's in raid 0. (I know its risky but i have a nightly backup server)
I use the on board raid (on board raid card by AMD) Is it worth upgrading to a dedicated PCI E raid card? And If I did do you loose data?

you will need raid card for 2 reasons only ..

1- Raid 5 or above .
2- Raid 0/5/6/etc for more than 2000M/s ... since the motherboard chipset caps at 2000MB/s while the 8 lanes PCI express 3.0 raids can give you upto 8000MB/s ... (need 16 SSD minimum for that)

for 2 drives , you dont need a card at all. even for 2 SSD .

 

[Solandri]

RAID cards are pretty much obsolete. Way back in the day (like 1980s), the parity calculations for RAID 5 were more than the typical CPU could handle. So they created specialized hardware to do those calculations, put them on a card with hard drive connectors, and you had a RAID card.

Nowadays, the average CPU can do the parity calculations without even blinking. In fact every RAID chipset I've seen on a motherboard is actually fakeRAID. When it boots to the OS it loads a driver which does the actual RAID. In other words, it's exactly the same as software RAID except there's a bootstrap in the BIOS which allows you to hit F9 or something while booting to put you into a menu to set up your RAID arrays (OK they do allow you to RAID a boot drive easier than a purely software solution).

Dedicated RAID cards are used almost exclusively by corporations which don't want to mess around with software/driver incompatibilities. When they buy a RAID card, they usually buy a few spares and keep them in the closet. That way if the RAID card ever dies, they can just swap in a replacement and be back in business. If you buy just a single RAID card and it dies, (1) your data will be inaccessible until you can buy a replacement RAID card, and (2) your data is gone if they no longer sell a compatible RAID card.

So really, software RAID or fakeRAID is a much safer solution.

I should also point out that outside of benchmarks, there's little benefit to using RAID 0 unless you do a lot of sequential (large file) read/writes. For small files, it can even perform slower than no RAID.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/49858-seagate-barracuda-3tb-raid-0-performance-unleashed.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

 

[sna]

RAID cards are pretty much obsolete. Way back in the day (like 1980s), the parity calculations for RAID 5 were more than the typical CPU could handle. So they created specialized hardware to do those calculations, put them on a card with hard drive connectors, and you had a RAID card.

Nowadays, the average CPU can do the parity calculations without even blinking. In fact every RAID chipset I've seen on a motherboard is actually fakeRAID. When it boots to the OS it loads a driver which does the actual RAID. In other words, it's exactly the same as software RAID except there's a bootstrap in the BIOS which allows you to hit F9 or something while booting to put you into a menu to set up your RAID arrays (OK they do allow you to RAID a boot drive easier than a purely software solution).

Dedicated RAID cards are used almost exclusively by corporations which don't want to mess around with software/driver incompatibilities. When they buy a RAID card, they usually buy a few spares and keep them in the closet. That way if the RAID card ever dies, they can just swap in a replacement and be back in business. If you buy just a single RAID card and it dies, (1) your data will be inaccessible until you can buy a replacement RAID card, and (2) your data is gone if they no longer sell a compatible RAID card.

So really, software RAID or fakeRAID is a much safer solution.

I should also point out that outside of benchmarks, there's little benefit to using RAID 0 unless you do a lot of sequential (large file) read/writes. For small files, it can even perform slower than no RAID.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/49858-seagate-barracuda-3tb-raid-0-performance-unleashed.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

you still need SAS Raid cards to connect the harddisks ...