PCI IDE RAID cards... ?

[Thunder7780]

I was just curious if there is a negative performance hit when using a PCI IDE RAID card for a RAID 0 config, and if its a big enough performance drop that would make me not want to use it.


Thanks.

 

[MrBond]

I wouldn't see why. RAID has existed before the current crop of motherboards that have it built in. I built a massive server for a guy back in the day with a PCI Mylex Raid card that must have cost a fortune. It worked pretty well.

If there's any performance hit, it's probably so little you'd only see the difference in extensive benchmarking.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong though, maybe things have improved since I built that server

 

[DesolationWilliams]

theres not a noticable performance drop for pci ide raid cards. theres not even a noticable drop for sata raid cards.

 

[mlie]

the only problem for me is that my overclocked system cannot afford the pci ide/sata card, because
the pci frequency is not locked.

 

[piasabird]

While some hard drives are very fast, writing data is probably slow enough not to slow them down. I would be wanting to see some test data before I spent money. There may be some even faster 64 bit PCI-X Raid Cards. I would wonder whether they plan on making PCI-Express Raid Cards. With PCI Express you can have multi-directional data paths and multiple sockets to combine pathways. It is like having multiple raid cards.

If you were serious for speed you may want to think about Dual processor motherboards. At www.tomshardware.com they were talkin about how a dual Xeon system is cheaper than buying a P4EE processor based system.

 

[Jeff7]

I bought one of the Koutech (if that's how you spell it) PCI RAID cards from Newegg; think it was $20. It does the basic RAID's - RAID 0, 1, and 0+1. It probably offloads a lot of the processing to the CPU, but it still is not anything significant. RAID 0 with it is definitely faster than a single drive.
But RAID 0 (and even just single hard drives) make me nervous - hopefully I'll be able to save up a bit, and finally upgrade one of my systems to RAID 5. A compromise between speed and redundancy - who could ask for more?

 

[robcy]

While these card tend to take up a few CPU cycles, the increase in bandwidth from the Raid 0 more than makes up for this. I had a cheap raid card on an overclocked VIA400 chipset that ran fine with the PCI at 40mhz.

 

[imported_intercollector]

Most onboard motherboard raid chips run off of the PCI bus, so the performance difference is going to be minimal.

Currently, I have both an IDE Raid card and a SATA Raid card installed and both give very good performance. Although, one thing to note is that it was a bitch to set them up properly so that they could both be detected in the bios. Actually, right now my bios doesn't see my IDE Raid card at all, but it still works in windows. Can't boot off of it, can only boot off of the sata drives.