RAID Controller Shoot-Out
mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a comparison with benchmarks of three RAID controllers from Adaptec, LSI Logic, and Promise, and along the way gives you a little refresher course on RAID in general and why you want to use it: faster throughput, longer uptime, and improved data security. Motherboard RAID controllers do well when there's 'very little or no load on the CPU, I/O bus, and memory bandwidth. But with heavy traffic and processor loads, the limitations of the shared bus and the benefits of intelligent RAID's integrated IOP and memory cache have a more significant impact.'"
Sometimes all you care about is the maximum performance you can get out of a disk subsystem. You might not care about data loss because you've some other means of taking care of it (backups, replication, network raid etc.), or the data is dispensable. An example is a cluster of high performance database servers, with replication taking care of the data redundancy and a raid 0 disk subsystems because thats the best raw performance you can get.