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#1
Raid 0 for performance
I recently bought an Asus CG5290 system at BestBuy with Vista 64. I received the Windows 7 upgrade disk last week, and was considering buying a matching HD and setting up a RAID 0 array for better performance. I am not worried about redundancy, as I back up all my files on external storage.
I ran into an interesting issue: The motherboard which is advertised to be included in my package is the Rampage II Gene board, which includes Raid support up to level 10, and even an Intel utility called "Intel Matrix Storage Manager", which seemed a pretty cool little utility for setting up Raid without having to tweak the BIOS directly.
Coming to find out, Asus cut some corners by installing a dumbed down version of the board and adding a "(CG5290)" designation behind the model name. The BIOS is not upgradable unless you are a hacker (and then you are on your own), and the Intel utility is also missing - in short, this board does not support Raid. Period.
So now my only option is either to use Windows to do a software Raid (which I would prefer not to do), or to buy a PCI dedicated Raid Controller.
So here is my question: Is it worth all this BS in terms of performance increase? Will I really notice a doubling in read/write speed if I set up Raid 0 using a PCI card?
Is there an inexpensive (less than 40 bucks) card that supports Windows 7? I have read that this was hard to find.
If the increase in performance is noticeable, I would go through all the hoopla to make it happen. Otherwise, I would take the extra HD back and just do the Windows 7 upgrade and be done with it.