Quote Originally Posted by REVHEAD View Post
I just have a couple of questions guys, I just use my system for playing games, and like them to load as fast as pssable, now I know that ram cpu ect are all factors, but do these Areca cards make much of a differance compared to say the onboard raid on most Motherboards?

I run an x38 as well and was thinking about investing in an Areca Card
The simple answer is NO, for non-parity RAID such as RAID 0 or RAID 1 (mirror). The CPU overhead that you can offload to a dedicated card only becomes an issue with parity RAID, 5 or 6, as it's calculating that parity (getting the data of a particular byte in a stripe for every disk in the RAID set, then doing an XOR or similar operation on those bytes, then writing it out to the parity stripe/disk or checking it against the previously calculated parity byte there) that is time-intensive when it's done only in software.

Check the Hardware/Storage subforum for in-depth discussion on this. But bottom line: if you are using disks that your mobo Southbridge supports in RAID and are only using RAID 0 or 1, you are better off saving the money or adding more disks to your RAID set for more speed. A RAID card would be wasted.