my abit kx7-333 has onboard raid. Is it worth the cost of new drives
and time and will i see a preformace gain?
Not worth it.
It's KT133 chipset has PCI "issues", you won't get the kind
of boost from RAID that many other chipsets would provide,
and even in it's best light raid has little benefit for most
uses. In other words if you have been working with very
large files and every little bit helps, RAID0 might be worth
trying. On the other hand, many jobs might run faster with
two drives as separate volumes, a source and destination for
the file(s). Another exception might be a gamer, if you
find new levels take ages to load, and the box is primarily
for gaming so you're not at as high a risk for critical data
loss that rises with RAID0 versus single drive
configurations with redundancy on different physical disks
if not also removable backup (preferable).
Additionally, due to higher performance of the southbridge
integral ide controller, placing a single drive on it would
be faster than same drive as a single stripe or span on the
raid controller. IMHO, the best use for the RAID controller
on your board is to add drives not needing to be fast,
archival volumes, and after adding at least one HDD, you can
probably find a hacked bios (Google search) for your board
that uses the full Promise RAID bios instead of the "lite"
bios that typically comes with a motherboard-integral
Promise chip based solution.
Hacked bios would remove "RAID" support but add ATAPI, so
optical drives can be connected via that interface and the
faster southbridge channels have more positions available
for the highest-performance-needs hard drives.
I dont know where to find the hacked bios, but there are
some tools and bios at the following link, you'd have to put
it together yourself.
http://www.stormpages.com/crazyape/downloads.html