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RAID on MB vs RAID in Windows

T

tankman1989

Gawd
Joined
Aug 21, 2009
Messages
588
I'm torn between using the onboard RAID of my motherboard (Asus P8Z77-V) for a striped volume and for a mirrored volume. What I am most concerned about is what happens if the MB dies? Can I move this volume over to another MB that has Intel SATA controllers and will it be backwards compatible with newer faster controllers?

I've used Windows to stripe drives and I don't remember if they transferred to another system or not.

I know in Linux I can transfer a mdadm array over to any Linux system and there is no problem, is windows like this?
 
Less likely with raid 0 but with raid 1 you can delete the volume/array and you will have two drives with identical files, you can then take both and put them into another machine and raid 1 them again.

I've broken a raid1 with windows on it with no ill effect.
 
RAID in Windows is probably safer and more transportable. RAID on a motherboard is FakeRAID, as in it's just software RAID still. The controller on the motherboard is just passing commands to the CPU to do the RAID calculations.
 
SirMaster said:
RAID in Windows is probably safer and more transportable. RAID on a motherboard is FakeRAID, as in it's just software RAID still. The controller on the motherboard is just passing commands to the CPU to do the RAID calculations.
Click to expand...

I didn't realize onboard RAID was software RAID. I figured it had some hardware component, just used other system resources and didn't support as many RAID formats as dedicated card RAID. Interesting.

But software RAID is perfectly fine if you aren't running complex arrays, and it's come a very long way until now. Almost everyone who isn't running complex arrays, IMHO, may as well just use software RAID. And you can easily migrate arrays (vs. onboard RAID, which is hit-and-miss; for example, mine migrated fine from ICH9 to ICH10, but going to another chipset will have had issues).
 
According to Intel it's firmware raid, the reason it has a ROM in bios and you use software [if you want] to access the RST panel.

You could set up raid in bios, install the driver pre-OS and never use the software panel.

Microsoft is pure software raid handled by the OS.
 
With Intel, for the most part you can just relocate your drives to another Intel motherboard and my experience has been that newer versions are backwards compatible.
 
As far as I know, non-striped RAID levels such as RAID 1 don't actually write any metadata about the RAID configuration onto the disks themselves. The controller (or Windows if you're doing it soft) simply goes "oh, this guy wants me to make all writes to both disks, so I'll do just that". So if you pulled a disk out of a RAID 1 (be it hardware or software RAID), you should be able to stuff it as JBOD somewhere else and it'll read fine. Striped and striped parity arrays I'm sure are another story.
 
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