Quote Originally Posted by noobieocer View Post
hang on reading through this i getting more confused.... so you have ram for a raid controller? and why are you using that card if the southbridge raid is faster?
If you're referring to FEAR's post above, note that the term used was "initialised faster" - not faster per se. We've pretty much proven in this thread that in real-world usage scenarios, not just benchmark numbers, the Areca card puts out much greater performance than ICH RAID arrays. However, as mentioned, hardware RAID controllers take a long, long time to boot up, because they scan all ports for devices, recognise existing arrays, etc etc.

As for "RAM for a raid controller", sure. Any decent hardware RAID controller will feature on-card cache. The Areca cards just allow you to use a standard DIMM module instead of having the cache RAM soldered to the card, so you can upgrade the cache amount should you choose to.