DS4 - which RAID controller

[tinners]

Please can someone shed some light on the difference between the 2 RAID controllers (Intel and Gigabyte) on my DS4 board.

I think I read somewhere one only does software raid, the other does hardware ?

I want to run one Raptor as an OS disk and a RAID pair of data disks for redundancy.

Which is the best controller to use for each ?

As a matter of interest why do boards actually come with 2 controllers on them ?

Cheers

[tinners]

anyone ?

[BUFF]

the Intel is superior.
If you can I would run both off the Intel (I say if you can because apparently some ICH8R equipped mobos can't run a single drive on the ICH8R at the same time as an array).

As for why that particular mobo comes with 2 controllers - Intel in their wisdom dropped PATA support from the 965 chipset. So, in order that everybody could use their PATA opticals etc. the mobo mfrs had to add another controller - it just so happens that the most popular addon controller (JMicron) also has a pair of SATA ports as well as a PATA channel.

[Phil_P]

I think I read somewhere one only does software raid, the other does hardware ?

They are both actually software RAID. A true hardware RAID solution is way more expensive than either of those controller chips.

[tinners]

thanks chaps, that makes sense now.
A final question, what do you think the performance of RAID 1 will be on the Intel ? Will it be no slower than a non RAID solution ?

[tinners]

Just a quick post on my findings.
The RAID 1 implementation is faster read speed than the single drive and I notice no performance lag in writing data
The Intel RAID controller supports 6 SATA drives which can be in in a mixture of RAID or non-RAID config. e.g. I have 2 drives in a RAID 1 array and 2 drives not using RAID.
The Intel controller also works with Speedfan etc. for SMART monitoring (except the RAID drives) whereas the Gigabyte controller does not.