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I just got two new WD5000AAKS 500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s drives, and I need to put them in a RAID-0 array (I know that motherboard-RAID generally isn't the best for speed increases, but I have little choice). This RAID array will be just storing backups on a Linux server, and trust me, I know first-hand that RAID is not backup.*
My server is using a recycled D975XBX Intel motherboard (OEM is Alienware) with a Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.4 GHz. The motherboard has two groups of 4 SATA ports:
- 4 controlled by the ICH7R with Intel on-motherboard RAID @ 3.0Gb/s
- 4 controlled by a Silicon Image (SiI) 3114 controller @ 1.5Gb/s
My question is, for RAID0, which would be faster, using the built-in RAID with the Intel ports, or using the Silicon Image RAID?
As far as I can tell, the ICH7R uses the CPU for all of its calculations and RAID processing (and my server is very low-load so it wouldn't really matter), but I don't know if the SiI 3114 controller does any of the RAID calculations or if the operations are left to the BIOS & CPU. I suppose I could setup the drives on each and do some benchmarking with bonnie++
, but I figured that I should ask here first. Cheers!
* That's not even really relevant since it's a RAID0 array; not meant for redundancy of any sort.
EDIT: I just found this article from AnandTech with a review of the motherboard. It would appear that the ICH7R has better performance without RAID, but the article doesn't contain any tests with a RAID set.