Hi there list, i am new here so pls, forgive if it sounds dumb. We are going to build a couple of machines to run scientific simulations which are CPU intensive but also need a fast disk I/O. So we would go for RAID 0 w/ IDE drives and we would get a motherboard w/ RAID controler onboard (the HPT 370, e.g.). But after learning better and reading the list acrh., i have a few doubts: If i understood well, only DPT can do hardware RAID, all other are "more or less" software RAID. The ataraid support is just a layer between the requests and the physical disks. I mean "more" when running soft RAID, without RAID controler, since all disk requests/management would be done by kernel using main CPU and "less" when running w/ a RAID controler since some of the disk requests would be handled by the controler itself (releasing the CPU). OK. but what about an onboard RAID controler? Wouldn't the performance be similar for both controler RAID and soft RAID? So, why are there so many MOBO w/ RAID onboard? How would one (performance) benefit from using a RAID 0 controler onboard in a Linux system? Could you point me to a benchmark or comparison between plain software RAID and RAID using onboard controler (HPT, PRomisse, etc)?? thanks for your attention, Guilherme
