Which RAID controller? Nforce or Silicon Images

Hi,
I got a DFI Lanparty Sli-DR, and it's got both of these RAID controllers on board. Does anyone know which is likely to offer better performance at RAID-0?

Cheers...

Tom

I've had a few issues with the nForce controller, but none with the Sil Image ones.

makes 0 difference in real terms - neither is a raid controller, all the hard work will be done by your CPU and a windows driver

so performance will be "whatever your CPU can spare"

The Nvidia RAID runs at 3.0Gb/s and the Sil one runs at 1.5Gb/s

For a review go to ;
http://www.bjorn3d.com/read.php?cID=769&pageID=1373
and there are details in the specifications box.

The benifit of the Sil RAID is that it offers you RAID 5.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by directhex

makes 0 difference in real terms - neither is a raid controller, all the hard work will be done by your CPU and a windows driver

so performance will be "whatever your CPU can spare"

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Unless the driver is crap, which is often the case with the SI drivers.
Do a quick google and you'll see that lots of people have issues with them. If they work, great, if they dont, your in for a long ride.

I got a stonking 5MiB/s off a Silicon Image controller once.

Yeah, so I use NVIDIA RAID 1+0 - RAID 0 and 1 aren't that CPU expensive anyway, plus the controller is sat on the chipset, not the PCI bus, which makes it speedy.

Go with nVidia - it makes the RAID more likely to be 'portable' to a new system (or at least it did for me). Software RAID isn't as slow as some moan about - at least not in striped configuration - and you won't see 100% cpu when the drives working either. It's cheap and definitely faster than a bog standard cheap drive!

nF4 Raid all the way - more configurable, more portable and it gives me about 110Mb/s sustained transfer - damned fast.

Plus it lets you migrate in extra disks/hot swap and all sorts.

Matt

afaik dfi put all their 3114 controllers on the pci bus whereas the nvraid is on pci-e

so you can never get more than 133mb/s to your drives on the si image controller, and thats also being shared with whatever pci cards you have

disappointing especially as theyve done the same on the new cfx3200 board, its pointless as a raid5 controller unless you can keep everything else away from the pci bus

Thanks for all the input, I RAID-0d the system and it's blisteringly quick now.

Cheers...

Tom