RAID with ASUS P5W Deluxe

Travisty2012

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Mar 20, 2007
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I've read the manual for my new ASUS P5W Deluxe mother board but I'm still not quite sure what's going on. This mobo has 4 options for setting up RAID:

ASUS EZ-Backup w/ Silicon Image Sil4723 chip
Intel ICH7R Southbridge
Cross-RAID using both chips above
JMicron RAID w/ JMB363

Now, from reading it seems the JMicron is the one you use if you want to use external drives. The Cross-RAID is what you use when you want to setup more than 2 drives. My goal is to use 2 internal drives for a RAID 0 for the operating system. I'll use a third internal drive to do backups with and store my media files. So with this goal in mind, it seems these two options are eliminated.

The EZ-Backup at first sounds like what you would use to backup your system, not boot a operation system from it. However, one of the options is a RAID 0 and it gives you the warning that if you use this, you wont have any redundancy. Now, if this drive is a backup drive, it would be redundant since it's on the primary and on the raid backup. This makes me think you can use it as the operating system. It's "EZ" because you just plug the drives into the slots and you don't have to make any bios changes.

I guess my question is...performance wise and my setup goal in mind, what do I use? Silicon Image Sil4723 or Intel ICH7R Southbridge?

Thanks!


EDIT:

From reading more documentation (not ASUS's) the EZ-Backup can be used for an OS. It's just considered EZ because it's driverless. Plug and install OS. BUT, I want to know which one is faster. I will take the extra steps to use the ICH7R if it's quicker than the Sil4723 in the long run performance wise...

How do I know?