RAID Questions

[Patlabor]

I read the notice : P

1. Will be used for a gaming and BOINC.
2. Money is no issue for me.
But not looking to brake the bank with this guy.
Some thing more like this guy (but it kills Western Digitals ?)
3. Live in Canada
4. I'm a fanboy of AMD, ATI, ASUS.
5. All new parts.
6. Did some lurking, did not find to much.
7. There is going to be a phase change and water cooling in it - so yes OC.
8. As soon as I can find all parts I want.

Now that thats out of the way, here is my question(s).

This system will be using 4 HD in a RAID 0+1.
Went with them bc there cheap, will go with SSD latter as they get cheaper and bigger.
I was looking at motherboards like ASUS and maybe DFI.
They boards say they can do 0/1/5/10/JBOD(ASUS) and 0/1/0+1/5(DFI)
1+0 or 0+1 its all the same

If you compare the diagrams between RAID 0+1 and RAID 10 and ignore the lines above the disks you will see that all that's different is that the disks are swapped around. If the controller has a direct link to each disk it can do the same. In this one case there is no difference between RAID 0+1 and RAID 10.

But how can I tell if the motherboard has a real RAID controller on it is one of those "fake" ones that use up the CPU.
Some thing to chew on
Stay with on-board RAID or go with a controller card that can do all those fancy things.
Fire some knowledge at me.

[gingerbee]

all onboard is done by the cpu only standalone raid card with a processors offload there's no point for what your doing onboard is fine. jmo but unless your building a server that has a truck load of hdd/ssd's in it then there no point.

[martin_metal_88]

I all agree with gingerbee for the raid side. And if I can add something for the MOBO. I would go for the DFI all the time. DFI is know as a rock solid board with incredible bios and they have a way better layout compare to asus if you are looking to put 4HD + 1 Opt and hide the sata cable.

[MarkOne]

This Asus and especially this DFI are both ugly

look at this one.

Newegg.ca - MSI 790FX-GD70 AM3 AMD 790FX ATX AMD Motherboard - AMD Motherboards

[Patlabor]

Thank you all for the advice.
And I must day that MSI does look the best.

[Perineum]

Onboard RAID should be fine, but for hardware RAID I believe people are recommending the Perc5i

It's apparently fairly easy to find on ebay

Also, with a RAID 1+0 your rebuilding should be pretty transparent even with the onboard as there are no XOR raid parity to recover.