Why has there been a lack of gaming/gamer oriented RAID cards?

Beta said:

Why has there been a lack of gaming/gamer oriented RAID cards? As the gaming community keeps wanting to push the boundaries of computers why has hardware manufactures met the demand for fast raid controllers that are dedicated and have there on CPU and on board RAM. You would think that someone would want to get into this such as Asus brand “Republic of Gamers.” Any thoughts?

Well, because the gains from an elaborate RAID setup in regards to gaming aren't spectacular. RAID setups, provide redundancy of data...unless of course you are talking about a RAID0 stripe which provides no data protection whatsoever.

Earlier people who were drawn to running RAID 0 arrays with Raptors and such were attempting to max out their sequential read/write speeds. And they simply didn't have many other choices at their disposal.

Real RAID cards are very expensive. And far less expensive SSD's make the RAID setups questionable at best. With SSD, you not only get 300+ MB/sec sequential read speeds, but you get 0.1ms access time to your files <---This right here is the key to great performance, very low random access times. You don't get nearly that low with RAID setups.

Lets say you get a raid array with SSD and you hit 1500mb a second. Lets then say when you launch your game, the computer loads 400mb of data to get to menu. With a std hard drive at 100mb a seond, its a 4 second wait. A standard ssd at 300 mb a second loads it in just over 1 second. Your raid setup, finishes in .3 seconds. Well., if .7 seconds blows your mind then by all means, spend the money id instead save 1000 and deal with fractions of a single second.

Mfg's aren't going to waste their time and build products like fancy RAID adapters geared towards gamers because at the end of the day the tech community will realize the miniscule gains and thus the cards won't sell to anybody but the foolish or the person who is obsessed with the absolute highest benchmark with no regards to cost. This isn't the ideal market for a product like this.

If there was a market and potential for income, these companies would be doing it.

stormy13 said:

Sort of like the KillerNIC.

Exactly, had a friend buy one of those. When he bought a new PC, he didn't buy another one.