Motherboard 'emulated' RAID vs. standalone?

H

heyman421

banned
I checked out the RAID sticky, but i'm considering building a new 5200+ 64bit computer with my tax return, and some of the motherboards have 'emulated onboard raid' which can obviously run either a designated group of the SATA ports, or all of he SATA ports (depending on the motherboard) as a RAID 1,0, etc. etc.

I'm curious about the performance of these built-in raid configurations vs. standalone PCI-E raid controllers?

Are they identical in performance? Negligeable difference? Or is the performance not significant enough to base my motherboard selection on the RAID ability?

Sorry for the possibly unimportant question, but i've been out of the loop for a few years, never built my own computer, and the vast number of hardware choices are mindboggling.

Anyways, thanks in advance!
 
the performance you will get depends on how you set up the RAID, and RAID performance doesn't increase basic things. Unless you are going to do some video/digital audio editing, 3D rendering, or working with a HUGE data base, you will probably not see any kind of performance increase.

If you are mirroring, RAID 1, you will see a slight performance decrease because both drives have to wait until they are synched and both drives are constantly reading/writing at the same time.
 
it may be important to note: if you use a controller card, that's one slot used up right there.
 
ya, i just didn't know if the performance of an onboard controller was as good as the performance of a standalone card

i can explain my logic:

onboard audio = lots of noise floor, sometimes lots of system memory/cpu useage

onboard video = i don't know, the mere idea is too offensive to try it

so that's why i was worried.

Thanks guys.
 
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