Our Aim
To provide you with an overview on New And existing technologies, hopefully helping you understand the changes in the technology. Together with the overviews we hope to bring topical issues to light from a series of independent reviewers saving you the time And hassle of fact finding over the web.
We will over time provide you with quality content which you can browse and subscribe to at your leisure.
TekSpek 's
RAID
Date issued:
In summary
Although new RAID solutions are in the works, particularly
as the bandwidth offered by PCI-E is taken advantage of, the average
desktop user will be mainly interested in RAID5 or RAID0+1/1+0.
Falling prices of hard drives makes a large array possible for a
fairly low cost making it inexpensive and easy to enjoy the benefits
of a RAID system.
The Market
RAID support has found its way onto the vast majority of
consumer motherboards, certainly the models aimed towards the enthusiast.
These provide a good starting point for exploring RAID, but usually
only support the simple versions of RAID, usually enough for the
average user. Some will support more advanced forms of RAID, but
will use more CPU as a result, impacting system performance.
The add-in card market for RAID cards is quite broad. There are cheap add-in cards which are essentially the chips found in onboard solutions, but in the form of a PCI device. As prices begin to rise we begin to see more RAID modes supported along with a greater number of disks. Pay enough and you can get a dedicated RAID processor to perform the necessary calculations to look after the RAID array, there are even partial hardware solutions that do some work with a dedicated processor and some with the CPU. The more you pay, the more you get in terms of performance and capabilities, it's that simple.
Trends for onboard solutions remain relatively unchanged, with the only real differences in onboard RAID solutions being the adoption of support for SATA devices. You won't see any onboard chips with full hardware RAID support, cache or other such fancy features. Not on consumer motherboards, at least.
The Players
You will find the companies that produce storage controllers
also produce RAID capable versions. These include the likes of Silicon
Image, Highpoint and Promise, three names you'll often find used
in conjunction with onboard RAID solutions. NVIDIA's latest nForce
4 chipset has SATA RAID support built in. Add-in cards can also
be found from 3ware, LSI, Adaptec, XFX and Supermicro. All offer
different RAID levels, performance and channel numbers, prices reflecting
that.
