This thread is like a shared blog about this matrix raid, and there are a lot of infos & experiences from many other matrix raid users starting like my humble 2 cheap drives up to 6 (yeah, six) raided solid state iRam drives !
Just get a cup of coffee before you read through this gigantic thread !
Cheer !
Bing
Quick summary if you're asking "What is this all about ?" or lazy to read through all this long thread.
It is all about exploiting the best or speediest part of the hard drives (mininum 2) for best performance using the built in Intel south bridge chip AND use the slower part for data protection in Raid 1 / 5 or 10 (depends how many drives you use).
Currently this feature only available for Intel ICHxR Intel South Bridge chip and Areca Raid controller.
Layman term : "Slicing out the yummy topping from 2 or more drives to deliver better performance than just ordinary Raid 0".
Hey, I did that when I was a kid on other's birthday party.
Picture worth millio ........and so on...
EDIT : Also if you're on 4 drives, it can be RAID 5 or RAID 10 for the lower green part.
PS: Yes, it is not a holy grail for everybody, it is advisable that you read through the posts or post a question here if its really fit in your requirements.
Hi ! My 1st post here, sharing result on my 7200.10 Seagate perpendicular drive.
Software onboard raid using Intel Matrix Raid on two 7200.10 250GB which are two volumes at two physical disks -> Raid 0=80 G (boot/system drive) + Raid 1=192G (data drive).
Both disk's jumpers are disconnected to enable 3Gb transfer speed, it was connected (force to 1.5 GB) by factory default.
So far the noise and heat performance is excellent compared to my past experience with 7200.9 & 7200.7 family.
These are the results using two popular benchmark softwares :
Raid 0 , avg. seek is good since it is on narrow short stroked area, and burst speed is fast ! Yes, though it was from the cache, not mechanical but it beats SCSI Ultra 320.
This volume is designated for fast loader such as OS, programs & virtual memory. Found this is the best combination thru lot of pains (reformat, resizing & OS installs). The front faster region of the disk is perfect this purpose and also the burst speed is started to degrade above 100GB region. Ghost/disk image on the fresh installed OS captured for future recovery just in case !
Raid 1, not bad considered only for data
Raid 0
Raid 1
Raid 0 setup, Note: "Write Back Cache" must be manually enabled to get high burst transfer speed and it was disabled by default.
Raid 1 setup
Example Disk 0 detail
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