> On 01/06/11 11:11 AM, Gene Brandt wrote: >> Thanks for that bit of advice. I've never been able to recover from >> hardware raid on any Intel system. The software raid is simple to >> configure and it works! > > its not actually hardware raid. > > when you set the 'raid mode' in the BIOS, at power up it sets a bit in > the ICH chip which changes its PCI DeviceID from 'regular SATA > controller' to 'Intel Matrix FakeRaid'. thats *ALL* it does, change > the device ID. no other hardware changes. the controller is still a > plain old multiport SATA controller. > > the device ID is used to pick which driver by the OS plug-n-play > stuff. the regular setting choses the regular SATA driver while the > 'fakeraid' setting loads the fakeraid driver (dmraid in Linux). the > fakeraid driver implements all the raid in the device driver. > This is > only really useful for MS Windows non-Server distributions which don't > support native mirroring or whatever in the OS. Hi John, Another reason to use SW raid which I have switched too. Although the conversation did generate some really good info. Yea, that Intel RAID is a real POS. - aurf