If you read the entire post you would note that I wasn't disputing the fact that it offloaded the parity calculations to the CPU (similar situation for an onboard graphics card). I benchmarked it, and it is (as I said) only slightly faster than a single disk, however, speed isn't really the point of RAID 5. The point is that your data is mirrored without the performance loss of RAID 1. I can take my 500GB mirror drive to another computer and it has all of my data on it (the striped drives are a different story). The main point of RAID 5 is that if a single component in my computer fails, my data is safe, which is the case. However, if my mirrored HD dies at the same time that my motherboard dies, yes, I'll have a problem. If two HDs fail at the same time, yes, I'll have a problem. But you can't protect your data in a single system from a meteor strike. (Which is why I protect the really important info by FTPSing it off site). Before I decided on the setup that I did, I installed both ways, and benchmarked it. (I didn't think about trying pure software (in windows compmgmt.msc Disk Management Snap-in) RAID to see how it performed. I choose the method that required little intervention on my part to keep my data safe, and kept the performance alright. Note also, my system is SATA I, I don't know how SATA II performs as I haven't tested it. So before basing your choice on some article you read about how RAID will perform, see for your self, compare the numbers, and make a decision. Cheers :)

Using motherboard raid (RAID 5 2x250GB 1X500GB) : Random Access : 10.3 ms Average Read : 96MB/s Single SATA Drive (500GB): Random Access : 12.4 ms Average Read : 88.5MB/s So in my situation, for whatever reason, a single drive is in no way faster.

I have an xfx nforce motherboard. I use the onboard RAID 5 (2 x 250GB striped 1 x 500GB mirror). It's seek times, and read write throughput are slightly better than a single drive. One thing that is important to mention that I don't think anyone else has so far: The stripped drives should be the same model HD. If you are scrounging a bunch of HD's together that have been laying around and try to make a RAID 5 it's not going to work to well. RAID 0 sure, but any of the RAID levels that deal with parity should be on identical drives (for the striping anyway). Also note, in my board (which cost much much less than $600) RAID is indeed implemented at the hardware level. Software RAID is using the compmgmt.msc's Disk Management(local) Snap-in to create a RAID array. While the performance of RAID5, on my motherboard, isn't going to beat a $600 controller, it isn't the same as Software RAID. Think of onboard graphics cards, at the hardware level they use some RAM and they use some CPU cycles, but they aren't doing "software rendering" (which if anybody HAS used before is way way way worse than an onboard graphics card). In the end, my system isn't screaming speed, but it isn't slow either and all of my data is backed up against a hard drive failing, for my important stuff that I can't loose, I FTPS it off site (the only protection against fire, flood, theft of equipment, data corruption, etc). Well that's my two cents anyway. :zzz: :zzz: :zzz: