Intel raid or Promise raid?

[Anthony So]

My motherboard is Asus P4P800E Deluxe, running Windows XP pro SP2.
the motherboard has build-in Intel chipset ICH5R support SATA raid function.
But it also has a build-in Promise Fastack 378 SATA raid controller.

I have 2 SATA harddisks and planning to run raid 0 mode. Which SATA should I
use?
Intel or Promise, which one is faster, better?

 

[Guest]

RAID (redundant array of independent disks; originally redundant array of
inexpensive disks) is a way of storing the same data in different places
(thus, redundantly) on multiple hard disks. By placing data on multiple
disks, I/O operations can overlap in a balanced way, improving performance.
Since multiple disks increases the mean time between failure (MTBF), storing
data redundantly also increases fault-tolerance.

A RAID appears to the operating system to be a single logical hard disk.
RAID employs the technique of striping, which involves partitioning each
drive's storage space into units ranging from a sector (512 bytes) up to
several megabytes. The stripes of all the disks are interleaved and addressed
in order.

In a single-user system where large records, such as medical or other
scientific images, are stored, the stripes are typically set up to be small
(perhaps 512 bytes) so that a single record spans all disks and can be
accessed quickly by reading all disks at the same time.

In a multi-user system, better performance requires establishing a stripe
wide enough to hold the typical or maximum size record. This allows
overlapped disk I/O across drives.

There are at least nine types of RAID plus a non-redundant array (RAID-0):

RAID-0. This technique has striping but no redundancy of data. It offers the
best performance but no fault-tolerance.

Given the above, there is little to choose between various chips sets. Does
the manufacturer show a preference for RAID 0 with 2 HDDs in the user
manual. They must have some reason for providing two chips sets.

 

[Bob Davis]

My motherboard is Asus P4P800E Deluxe, running Windows XP pro SP2.
the motherboard has build-in Intel chipset ICH5R support SATA raid
function.
But it also has a build-in Promise Fastack 378 SATA raid controller.

I have 2 SATA harddisks and planning to run raid 0 mode. Which SATA should
I use?
Intel or Promise, which one is faster, better?

I have a GB 8KNXP with the same chipset and a Sil3112 in lieu of your
Promise controller. When I installed my RAID0 I asked for advice like
you're doing and the consensus was to use the on-chip ICH5R over the
on-board controller (Silicon Image in my case, Promise in yours). The
reasoning was that the ICH5R taxed the PCI bus less than the on-board
variant.

 

[Johnny Ragazzo]

It is faster to use the Intel on board chip for raid since the data
accesses the Southbridge chip directly giving you a higher amount of data
transfer speeds. This question was answered in a recent issue of Maximum
PC.

Hope this helps....
John

 

[Bob Davis]

It is faster to use the Intel on board chip for raid since the data
accesses the Southbridge chip directly giving you a higher amount of data
transfer speeds. This question was answered in a recent issue of Maximum
PC.

I'm saving your comments so the next time I reply to this question I'll
state it more succinctly. Thanks.