Are all Intel controllers capable of raid?

[GotNoRice]

I recently configured two of my 500gb seagate drives in raid-0 on my ICH10R, but even though my SSD wasn't part of the raid array, it didn't like me switching from AHCI to RAID in the bios and I got a bluescreen when booting windows 7. I switched back to AHCI but to my surprise windows still recognized the raid configuration I had setup on the two 500gb drives when I had it in raid mode.

The real surprise however occurred when I moved the drives over to another board that just has an Intel ICH7 southbridge, no raid anything. The raid array was still detected in windows and worked as expected!

So it seems like the only difference between an intel ICH and an ICHxR is the bios (being able to boot from raid) and the bios-level configuration, but once an array is created it can apparently be read on any Intel south-bridge SATA controller.

Has anyone else been able to replicate this?

 

[Lazn_Work]

It wouldn't surprise me since it is cheaper to make one chip and disable unused features than to make two different ones.

However, you may run into ones that were made non R chipsets due to defects in the silicon, just like disabled cores on AMD cpus.

 

[orpheus88]

I did experience the "RAID-Array working under AHCI"-part but the raid-functions are software-based anyways so why shouldn't it work.

 

[drescherjm]

It wouldn't surprise me since it is cheaper to make one chip and disable unused features than to make two different ones.

I am pretty sure there is not any raid hw (no xor processor ...) in the chip. The raid is just like any other fakeraid. A normal sata controller with a bios to boot a software raid array and then a windows driver that does software raid.

 

[Lazn_Work]

I am pretty sure there is not any raid hw (no xor processor ...) in the chip. The raid is just like any other fakeraid. A normal sata controller with a bios to boot a software raid array and then a windows driver that does software raid.

I am sure it is firmware RAID too.. but those are not windows driver level RAID since they work with DOS and LINUX.. they are software at the BIOS level.