Neil Bothwick wrote:
On Mon, 27 Apr 2009 16:18:39 +0400, Yahya Mohammad wrote:
I'm setting up a new desktop machine with RAID 0. The motherboard I
bought supports the so-called "Fake" RAID, which offloads most of the
processing to the system CPU. What are the pros and cons of using this
as opposed to pure software RAID?
The advantage of FakeRAID is that you get to depend on a Windows-only
driver that only works with your motherboard and will prevent the RAID
working if the motherboard files and you try to connect the drives to a
different system. For some reason,this gives Windows users a warm, fuzzy
feeling.
Maybe you want pure hardware raid that's a pci(-e) slot that has a chip
doing all the parity calculations plus a battery keeping data that
didn't manage to write in case of a power failure. That's the best option.
For a mb in order to have fake raid capabilities from my understanding
it has to have a raid chip itself but still most of the calculation is
done by the CPU.
Software raid can be done OS dependant... and you don't need any
hardware or chips for that, it's a form of OS fooling itself instead of
the MB fooling the OS (fake one).
From my experience with fake raid 0 on 2 hdd's the speeds would be very
nice when talking about small files, but for files with 1gb or more the
writing speed would decrease as the parity calculations get more
complicated.
