The on-motherboard RAID feature is usually a "fake RAID" in that there is no dedicated processing hardware. As such, it's generally thought that using any RAID option will cause a slight performance hit b/c the CPU is doing the work. I would think that the hit for RAID 1 would be quite a bit less than RAID 5 because of the simpler nature of the beast. I do use fake RAID 1 on my son's and wife's computers, and some others where the machines never work too hard and the performance hit is not noticeable.
A very opinionated view of fake RAID can be found at: http://thebs413.blogspot.com/2005/09/fake-raid-fraid-sucks-even-more-at. html Also, you should have a look at Robin Harris's comments about RAID 5 on modern large drives. Very interesting (and controversial) stuff. http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=483 http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=164&tag=rbxccnbzd1 From: James Kerr [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 11:50 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: SATA RAID Performance On my personal PC at home my mobo has a RAID feature and I have to large hard drives in there. Anyone know if I would see a performance increase if I set these drives up as RAID1 or would it just give me mirroring and no increase? What about if I added a third drive and made it RAID5? James ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
