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Configurations of RAID levels are done in one of two ways: Hardware or Software. Software based RAID are obviously cheaper since there is no other hardware to buy, but tend to be slower because they use OS resources to handle all the data requests.

Hardware based configurations are more expensive, but provide a performance boost in the system, and also provide something else software-based solutions cannot: compatibility. Usually it takes a server OS such as Windows NT to handle any kind of software RAID array configuration. But with hardware-based solutions, all that’s needed is a good set of drives, the hardware controller, and a compliant driver to run the card. This means you can not only have a fault tolerant Network server, but you can speed up that gaming desktop at home running Windows 98 with an ultra fast RAID 0, or a data protecting RAID 1.

So what are your choices for hardware based IDE RAID 0 or RAID 1 solution? Let’s take a closer look at three different IDE RAID cards from Promise, Iwill and AMI.