directed @ both valis and chunkymonster: im wondering though, since both of you have used/own hardware raid controllers, how do you feel they perform compared to general software based onboard raid controllers as far as an improvement in overall performance? for things such as general windows usage, games, and the like?
im genuinely wondering if there really is an appreciable difference, or if onboard software raid could nearly be considered hardware raids equal in this respect
thanks
as the poster above stated, it also depends on what raid level you're going to be using. raid 5 and 6 and others that utilize parity require much more intensive computations and processing power than other raid levels. so on my raid 5 arrays i use hardware based controllers, for my mirrored arrays i use software controllers.
i dont reccomend using onboard raid PERIOD. to much crap can go wrong and you're generally locked in, meaning if something goes belly up with your motherboard and you cant find the exact same one then you're pretty much hosed on the raid as well, it's generally not a walk in the park moving one raid setup from one controller to another (if not impossible).
i dont use raid in a general setup, there just isn't enough boost to justify it. i use a 120 gig raid 0 as a scratch and speed disk in my main machine, it's fastest at unrar'ing and unzipping and compressing and uncompressing multiple gig size files. when you're unrar'ing something 8 gig in size there is definately a speed increase, by several minutes. however, if you just want to load your game faster, you'll be sitting at the "loading" screen ~10 seconds less than otherwise. meh. also, if one drive fails, the whole thing goes, and so nothing of importance is kept on the drive.
on another computer i use a software raid 1 for security, if one drive fails there's an automatic backup.
i have two storage boxes both with hardware based raid controllers, one with 4 x 160 gig drives, one with 6 x 500 gig drives, 450 gig and 2.5 terabyte respectively. they both sit on their own machines, the 2.5 terabyte is a dedicated storage box, expandable to 10+ terabytes. it's a pci-express raid card, but is software based. i didn't need a hardware based raid since this is a seperate box and the machine can work on calculating parity and it doesn't bother me over on my main machine.
so in a nutshell, if you are using raid 5 or 6 or such for storage you want a card that can calculate the parity bit in hardware if you're also using that machine for other tasks, like video editing. if it's a standalone box, software is fine (but not onboard, be sure you know the difference).
if you want application speed you'll probably do fine with onboard since you'll be using raid 1, striping, which isn't computationally intensive, but dont put anything you can't bear to lose on the drive, and i wouldn't make it my OS. add in two drives, stripe them, and use them for installed games, with your other applications and especially important data elsewhere.
valis
hope that helps a bit. this has probably been a bit rambling.