Difference between traditional SATA and Intel Matrix Tachnology

[copeland3300]

Hey all. I was wonder what the difference was between a traditional SATA connectors and ones that support Intel Matrix Technology. I was reading that matrix is a sort of hybrid of different RAID types, but i wasn't sure. Can anyone clarify for me?

[cyberjt]

Nothing different with the actual physical connectors, difference is in the modes that the different technologies support. The majority of SATA implentations on motherboards allow you to do RAID 0 or 1 with two hard drives or 0+1 with 4 hard drives - i.e. with two hard drives you effectively decide to either stripe them for speed or mirror them for redundancy.

With the intel matrix technology you have the option to split the the hard drives up at a lower level which allows you to have RAID 0 on one part of the drives and at the same time have RAID 1 on the other - or many combinations of each - i.e. multiple RAID 0 or 1 or any combination of containers. eg - my two 250GB SATA drives have two containers on each - 20GB and 230GB - the two 20GB are in RAID 0 on the outside of the drive - giving me a fast RAID 0 40GB drive presented to the BIOS and the two 210 containers are in RAID 1 presented as a 210GB drive giving me redundancy for storage of important files.

Please note though that if you are going to use RAID 0 that you have a decent power supply - SATA drives seem to be very sensitive and a fluctation in the power renders the RAID 0 marked as failed which only unplugging the power and re-conecting sorts out (found this out - after RMAing the drive and then finding out it was fine - problem persisted until I upgraded the power supply - believe me all 400W power supplies are not the same!)

[USMC2Hard4U]

It is just a fancy way for the special way Intel handles their Raid.

[copeland3300]

so will i be able to make use of the HDD's NCQ on both the standard SATA connectors and the matrix connectors or does NCQ just work with matrix?

If it's only one drive for now, does it really matter which connector I use?

[cyberjt]

so will i be able to make use of the HDD's NCQ on both the standard SATA connectors and the matrix connectors or does NCQ just work with matrix?

If it's only one drive for now, does it really matter which connector I use?

That depends on your motherboard and what the standard SATA header controller supports

[copeland3300]

i have a Intel D955XBK board if that helps. It has 4 standard SATA and 4 Matrix connectors.