This isn't directed at the poster - it's more a rant directed at all the people on these forums who have promoted this bad idea, you know who you are - but....
Why do people actually buy hardware add-on cards for RAID-0? Why on earth do others advocate it?
Let me spell it out plainly:
There is *nothing* that a hardware add-on card can do to improve performance with RAID-0. It can provide on-board cache, which can be a benefit to *some* desktop users, but unless your motherboard-based RAID solution is garbage (ie. NF4), you will not see any noticeable improvement. RAID-0 has no calculations to perform and no optimizations that can be made. Even those interrupts which it does generate *must* be sent to the CPU and cannot be offloaded to the card.
Now, if you still want a RAID card, go get a Promise software-based card. It'll cost you <$80 and it'll do as much as the hardware-based card with no loss in performance. RAID-1 performance is actually even improved versus most hardware cards.
*waits for all those posters who bought $600 Areca cards for RAID-0 to start chiming in, knowing they won't address anything I said... they never do... *
Edit: If you have the money to spend though, then I'd look long and hard at a RAID-5 array using a $500 card. Performance will be somewhat comparable to RAID-0, just without one of the disks. Considering the tradeoff that your data is secured against some disk failure, I think it's a good deal. It doesn't do anything against corruption (which you may very well see from a failing hard drive), but that's another matter.
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