Quote Originally Posted by jcool View Post
Usually? Never.
Now as for Areca vs. onboard, the Areca will win overall especially at 4k random write/read like F.E.A.R. pointed out. Even though you probably won't "feel" much of a difference running most standard tasks.
I think we need some real world tests because the only advantage I can see with a raid card is cache for 4k writes. What about reads? They usually out number writes! Also the x25-m doesn't need any help in that department anyway.

I think benchmarks with drives on raid controllers give unrealistic performance promises due to cache affecting the benchmark.

Does the cache improve read performance?

@ One_Hurts perhaps you could chime in, as I know you used to use hardware raid.