Quote Originally Posted by james bennett View Post
Ya I have heard that the ICH9R set-up stinks for RAID. If you ask me I think thats pretty crappy, I mean you spend good money on a mobo and they have shotty controllers. Mine does alright but, it is lower than the manufacturer benchmarks. (supposed to be 100mb/s read and 80mb/s write and .1ms access times)I want to add more drives eventually than my mobo based raid will support anyhow.
I know with a dedicated CPU and a nice cache on a controller card that my throughput will jump.
The integrated stuff was never intended to be a high end controller replacement, it was intended to be better than "software raid" which in some cases might be better than hardware raid :p

You just cannot beat the 800-1200mhz dual core adapters with a onboard chip on a 200-300$ motherboard when the adapter you are comparing to costs more than the motherboard and thats the very low end of the good adapter market.

Adapters are so important I went from one adapter to another generation on the same array and picked up a consistent 15MB/s (older SCSI stuff that was 75 before and 90 after) and better performance all round and it seems to be heavily influenced by the software as well as the speed of the on board processor.