Is a raid card worth it for me?

[Leonofhyjal]

I can't decide if an LSI 4 port would be worth it for me (with the backup battery of course). I'm running 4 Samsung 120 EVO's in raid 0 (OS, games, and PS AE). This is on my Haswell system running a 4770k @4.6 on an Asus M6F. 

 

Mainly I'm wondering if the 512-1gig of ram on the LSI cards would make a noticeable difference. If not then I'll probably just stick with on board raid. I haven't been able to find many benchmarks regarding read speeds with ssd's over 400mbps, and the last thing I wanna limit are reads on 50gig project files lol.

 

1) Is it much of a performance gain over on board?

2) How is the reliability? 

3) Is it worth it to replace the 512-1gig of ram on LSI cards to something higher performance? And does it support ECC dimms?

4)I've found that when you buy high end products there are almost always cons... Any that I'm missing here?

 

 

Thanks in advance for any replies! 

 

[jscho]

Probably not. RAID 0 requires very little calculation. The performance you are getting now would be about the same as if you were to get a RAID card.

It's actually probably better off you don't get one, because you are eliminating a point of failure (the card).

[IdeaStormer]

I definitely think you are missing something.

 

1. What is your ultimate goal with your storage setup?

2. What is wrong/bad with your current setup?

 

Spending money on tech you have no idea about or its feature set without any idea of what you want to do with it is no way to start.

[wpirobotbuilder]

I can't decide if an LSI 4 port would be worth it for me (with the backup battery of course). I'm running 4 Samsung 120 EVO's in raid 0 (OS, games, and PS AE). This is on my Haswell system running a 4770k @4.6 on an Asus M6F. 

 

Mainly I'm wondering if the 512-1gig of ram on the LSI cards would make a noticeable difference. If not then I'll probably just stick with on board raid. I haven't been able to find many benchmarks regarding read speeds with ssd's over 400mbps, and the last thing I wanna limit are reads on 50gig project files lol.

 

1) Is it much of a performance gain over on board?

2) How is the reliability? 

3) Is it worth it to replace the 512-1gig of ram on LSI cards to something higher performance? And does it support ECC dimms?

4)I've found that when you buy high end products there are almost always cons... Any that I'm missing here?

 

 

Thanks in advance for any replies! 

1. There is probably some performance gain. Onboard controllers can be very speedy depending on the manufacturer, but the LSI controllers are enterprise-grade tech. However, it would really depend on the RAID card. Any old LSI card would perform very well, however their 9280 series cards are optimized for SSDs. Those would probably be much faster than an onboard controller.

 

2. Still more reliable than a hard drive or RAID0 of hard drives. However you are introducing the controller as another point of failure, and your overall risk of array failure is larger because you're running so many SSDs in RAID 0. A single, large SSD is still better unless you absolutely need the increased performance.

 

3. Since you're running SSDs, the onboard cache provides very little benefit. It is of most use to hard drives, where random performance is light-years slower than an SSD.

 

54. You are spending lots of money and you are risking compatibility issues with your motherboard (if you're not using one that explicitly supports RAID cards).