Motherboard RAID support or Hardware RAID controller?

Solution 1:

Since you don't specify why you want RAID my answer is going to include a link to this brilliant article from one of WHS team members here with regards to why WHS doesn't use RAID, however it covers the advantages and disadvatages of RAID very well.

RAID-0 is solely for speed, and since you already have the SSD drives, the only real advantage it is going to give you is? I am not sure to be honest. RAID needs power and any person that has managed RAID server will tell you it is heavy on drives themselves hardware wise.

If you using RAID for backup purposes, well then your doing the wrong thing and rather invest in an external backup solution or alternatively a server like WHS for example.

Very few power user need RAID even at home. The performance impact is minimal when compared to hardware life.

If you however do choose to go this route, it really depends how much your spending on the board. a high performance server board with RAID compared to a desktop board with RAID will always be a better option, depending on who makes the chipset. If you are going to buy a cheap board, which you shouldn't anyway, I would suggest looking at an external card. Most of the top RAID cards have their chipsets available standalone or on the motherboard, so it may be wiser to investigate what card you want and see if it is available on a motherboard already.

Solution 2:

Having different RAID's depends on your raid controller. The higher-end ones generally have more speed/features/support more drives. Motherboard RAID controllers are still considered 'hardware' RAID solutions, and usually have dedicated silicon for that purpose.

Usually how RAID's work is you build a 'span' or 'volume' across your disks from some BIOS pre-boot menu system. When you get an operating system installed on your computer, these volumes show up as a harddrives. The hardware-based RAID hides the underlying disks from the OS and you only see the volumes you built. You then install normally.

Sometimes this requires special drivers, but I believe that most RAID controllers are usually visible to the modern preinstall-phase of an OS (at least with Windows Vista & 7).

RAID tends to work better when you use matching drives in any particle grouping -- here's a good tool to calculate the space you get from a particular RAID type & number/size of drives.

Raid Calculator

Solution 3:

I've been using onboard RAID on my motherboard (Intel P55 chipset) and I can tell you from experience with a handful of different intel-based motherboards that that it depends on how you intend to use it. You should note that the Intel RAID seems to be a variety of RAID called "hardware-accelerated". It's not hardware RAID, so uses a bit more CPU time than you'd expect.

I was planning to use it as a RAID-1 (mirror). And I can tell you for certain that you should avoid the Intel-based motherboard RAID solution. Whenever your PC bluescreens, reboots unexpectedly, or looses power (in a power outage) or you press the reset button, then the RAID array must rebuild itself entirely. If you have 1-TB drives, this can take 6-8 hours sometimes of the computer acting VERY slow. Completely defeats the purpose of using RAID.

If you use the Intel-based RAID solutions in a RAID-0 (stripe, no redundancy) it will probably be better, because there will be no rebuilding.

If you're planning to use the onboard RAID to do RAID-5, give up now. It can take days to resync/rebuild.

Hardware RAID adapters are coming down in price. I'm looking into one for myself right now (replacing my motherboard-based controller) and cross-my-fingers that I can find one that won't have the same rebuild-issues that my Intel controller has. And it gets even more complicated when looking for a RAID controller that is SSD-friendly (TRiM support) or has the latest SATA3 (6 gbps) connections and fits in your available slots. I've seen cards for PCI-E 1.0 x1, x4, x8 and others for PCI-E 2.0 x4 or x8.

Solution 4:

None of these answers is true or accurate. A true hardware raid has it's own caching memory, Its own processor, and often boots itself into a Linux based o.s. that detects and manages the devices and the cross talk to the host computer. In addition almost every raid above is pinned to the south bridge which depending on a shared max x4 PCIe buss that all of the built in devices share. Most intelligent raid controllers are 8x PCIe gen 3 or higher. It is all about the bandwidth of the buss and direct access to memory and throughput from drive to drive. The fake hardware raid listed above are nothing but masquerade jugglers with a driver engine.