Z97 raid... is it software?

I have been wondering whether the so-called "raid" available on the Z97 boards are actual raid or some sort of fake soft-ware based raid?

It's very rare that any onboard RAID is something besides software.

Even if it does have a dedicated RAID chip it's still usually a hybrid and not full hardware RAID.

Thats kind of what I thought, but its been at least 5 years since I have approached this so I thought maybe things have changed

Stratus_ss said:

Thats kind of what I thought, but its been at least 5 years since I have approached this so I thought maybe things have changed

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Meh, not really, a dedicated card is still vastly superior.

Most onboard RAID controllers (barring server boards with integrated RAID cards) are software RAID by definition. They are not hardware RAID as they do not have local processors or memory, which means everything is handled by the processor. They aren't fully software RAID either, which means it is handled by software running on an OS.

Let's call them grey RAID controllers because they are turds.

thideras said:

Let's call them brown RAID controllers because they are turds.

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Fixed that.

I do not know if it is "true RAID" or "software RAID", with the software being on the hardware itself. But it is the first Intel based RAID that presents the RAID volume as a single drive like a true hardware RAID would. Not one of my software (not even Windows), other then Intel's own Rapid Storage software, recognizes that there are two drives in a RAID set.

Small server boards lately have the same Intel RAID controllers. These controllers are great and often faster than full hardware RAID for small RAID 0/1/10 setups but for bigger they lack additional cache etc. Also RAID 5 on integrated controllers is bad idea because of missing cache ( well, it's shared RAM ) and some other things.
Intel is still using 2 pcie lines for RAID so in every generation since 5 series chipsets ( X58/P55/H55 ) you can count on max near 1-1.1GB/s bandwidth. Not an issue for HDD but 2 good SSD will reach this limit.
Intel CPUs are really fast comparing to these chips on hardware RAID cards and you can see some storage performance gain while overclocking CPU ( mainly random transfers ) but only CPU is not making good storage controller. Also access time is usually faster than on full hardware RAID but during longer work when data is cached then dedicated memory is much better.