RAID Hardware

[JGalsky]

Hello,

I've rencently been looking at RAID controler cards.  I have 2 6tb WB red hard drives and 2 500gb SSDs and I have onboard RAID controler and I want to know if buying a RAID card would help with faster boot up times and more eficent and/or faster read/write speeds and if it's worth it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[79wjd]

what kind of RAID and whats the pupose of the build/arrays?

[ShadyHost]

If I'm not mistaken the onboard Raid controller can handle the bandwidth of current SATA drives just find. You would really benefit from a Raid card if you had some kind of complex setup with a raid 0 being backed up or something like that

 

 

I could be wrong but in my opinion it's just not worth it. 

[scottyseng]

4 hours ago, JGalsky said:

-snip-

I would not resort to hardware RAID for such a small configuration / in this case, it wouldn't improve efficiency or speeds much. The onboard RAID will handle it (I mean the only RAID choices you have are RAID 0 or 1)...both don't stress the RAID controller much at all. A hardware RAID controller (A proper new one) will run you about $500-700. It's simply not worth it. You could buy a 950 Pro or a Intel 750 for less than you would spend on a hardware RAID controller. I'd only recommend hardware RAID if you have a lot of hard drives (like 6+) or need to use the harder RAID levels like 5, 6, 50, or 60. The other thing is that hardware RAID usually does not support TRIM, so you usually want to avoid having SSDs on a hardware RAID controller (Unless you use some kind of SSD cache add-on like LSI's CacheCade software).

 

Finally, a RAID controller would destroy your boot time. It goes:

Motherboard BIOS -> LSI MegaRAID controller BIOS -> Motherboard BIOS -> then load your OS. It usually adds on roughly 30-45 seconds to the boot time.

 

In my opinion, I would keep all of your drives separate. No RAID at all leads to the fastest boot time, and you might not even notice the speed difference. You could have the OS on one SSD and programs on the other. Then the two hard drives can be data / storage / backup.

[brandishwar]

10 hours ago, JGalsky said:

Hello,

I've rencently been looking at RAID controler cards.  I have 2 6tb WB red hard drives and 2 500gb SSDs and I have onboard RAID controler and I want to know if buying a RAID card would help with faster boot up times and more eficent and/or faster read/write speeds and if it's worth it.

As others have said, the answer on this is largely No. There isn't a lot of benefit to going with a hardware RAID controller for your particular setup. The onboard RAID support in most motherboards is more than enough to handle light workloads. While there are inexpensive RAID cards that can provide good support, even those are going to be about half the cost of one of your SSDs. Be careful with putting SSDs in any kind of RAID configuration, though, as TRIM support may end up limited or disabled entirely, as the RAID setup could mask the fact that the target drives are SSDs.