Does my Alienware 18 laptop have hardware or Software RAID?

[Berryracer]

Someone told me that Software RAID is the worst kind of RAID and the fact that it's a laptop with no dedicated RAID card, it means this is software RAID so I asked on the NBR forums and one guy said this.....

I think that is mostly a play on words, perhaps a hold-over based on old technology. Before RAID was common, you had to buy a piece of hardware to add RAID functionality (third party controller, typically PCI, but they had ISA RAID cards as well). There is a "Windows RAID" option that is entirely software based and managed by the OS. That is what I would call a software RAID.

The drive controllers are hardware (chipsets) that function through instructions provided by firmware and drivers. The fact that they don't rely on Windows to create drive memberships qualifies them as a hardware solution. You can use the Intel RST Windows utility or the Intel Option ROM (Ctrl+I at boot) to create the drive membership. You don't need a third party add-on card to qualify as hardware RAID. Some desktop boards include both a native drive controller and an add-on expansion chipset to provide more SATA ports and added functionality. The native and add-on drive controllers are both hardware.

So what do you think? I can create the RAID Array through the BIOS at bootup but is that software or hardware RAID?

 

[Berryracer]

interesting post in this thread:

As Tostito mentioned it is not hardware RAID, but its not 'hybrid' RAID either. It is technically still software RAID since the processing is not handled by its own chip. The firmware may define a RAID BIOS for the system board but that's all it does. By all definitions it is still purely software.

and another interesting comment in this thread:

raid isn't designed for notebooks. notebooks can't take advantage of raid's benefits, dont have room for the additional drives, and have other bottlenecks.

jesus... everybody and their momma hears "**** RAID IS DA SHEEET!! I WANNA!!!" and jump on the "i have no clue what i'm doing" bandwagon.

Valis

Quoted for truth. Let's increase heat, power consumption, in turn decrease battery life, increase the size of the notebook, reduce the stability, and likely slightly increase the seek time of a system that already has rather bad seek times already, all for something that likely won't make the system noticeably faster even.

RAID on the desktop is questionable already, RAID in a notebook is just dumb.

I don't know what to make of this now.......confused if I should keep my current single SSD setup or try RAID 0 again

 

[Berryracer]

I also noticed that when I did RAID 0 on my laptop, it took double the time to create an image using Macrium Reflect so yes my benchmarks did go up much higher but the real world performance was actually slower unless I'm missing something here? I want your professional opinion on this please

 

[R0H1T]

Try some diskbench software like crystaldisk or whatever, see CPU usage & interrupts using process explorer or hacker. The more CPU cycles the benchmark consumes, conversely less interrupts being issued, will tell you that it's a software RAID. If it's the opposite then it's a hybrid or hardware RAID, in my case it's close to 100% using crystaldiskmark, because more interrupts = dedicated (or more) hardware. That's what I know.

 

[Berryracer]

Try some diskbench software like crystaldisk or whatever, see CPU usage & interrupts using process explorer or hacker. The more CPU cycles the benchmark consumes, conversely less interrupts being issued, will tell you that it's a software RAID. If it's the opposite then it's a hybrid or hardware RAID, in my case it's close to 100% using crystaldiskmark, because more interrupts = dedicated (or more) hardware. That's what I know.

Benchmarks as I said are higher, but in the real world, I don't notice any speed difference and it's actually a bit slower in some tasks like creating a disk image so it makes me think maybe it's software RAID that's just done through the BIOS?

Single Drive:

CrystalDiskMark with IRST 12.8.0.1016 (W8)

RAID 0 x2:

CrystalDiskMark with IRST 12.8.0.1016 RDx2 (W8)

 

[R0H1T]

Benchmarks as I said are higher, but in the real world, I don't notice any speed difference and it's actually a bit slower in some tasks like creating a disk image so it makes me think maybe it's software RAID that's just done through the BIOS?

Did you notice the overall CPU usage? Anything over 50% consistently means software RAID & looking at the results I bet that's the case & I;ve never heard of hybrid RAID

 

[Berryracer]

Did you notice the overall CPU usage? Anything over 50% consistently means software RAID & looking at the results I bet that's the case & I;ve never heard of hybrid RAID

Me neither bro, someone on the Alienware forums mentioned this Hybrid RAId BS basically what it is, is it's software RAID but done through the BIOS not through Windows, based on that, what are all those companies selling laptops boasting about when they market their laptop, like I recently saw one ad of one ASUS gaming laptop the ad said "get 4x the speed with 4 SSDs in RAID 0 mode" that's pure marketing BS IMO because it's not real RAID!

I'm gonna go for a single drive setup in that case.

Thanks man

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Yeah, motherboard RAID is typically a "software" RAID implementation inasmuch as the "RAID Controller" (chipset) is using CPU cycles to do the work.

They work fine for HDDs, but are often an IO bottleneck for SSDs in random IO. They also make data recovery and drive cloning more complex. Me no likey.

 

[smakme7757]

Most people split it like this:

Dedicated RAID controller = Hardware RAID
No dedicated raid controller = Software RAID

However the point of "Software RAID" being really bad is wrong.
If you are doing any RAID that doesn't involve parity calculation then "Software" RAID is fine. If you want a RAID level that uses parity a dedicated controller will give you better performance.

Additionally, dedicated RAID controller will typically allow you to expand your storage by 8+ disks on a 2 port controller.

I use Windows Storage Pools on my servers and it works fine. I've got 2 pool. 1 with 6x 2TB and 1 with 2x 500GB SSD. They work fine. No disk failures yet and very good performance.

 

[smakme7757]

Did you notice the overall CPU usage? Anything over 50% consistently means software RAID & looking at the results I bet that's the case & I;ve never heard of hybrid RAID

Software RAID even with a RAID level using parity, like RAID 5, wouldn't even pull 10% CPU in the worst of cases. Modern CPU's crunch though such simple maths.

If you're using RAID 1 or RAID 0, then you're CPU might be taxed 0.5/1% maybe 3% at the very worst.

To put it in perspective, I'm running 6 VM's on a machine using "Software RAID" with a 6 drive RAID 10 and a 2 drive RAID 0 and the CPU sits at 5/20% depending on what the VM's are doing.

 

[R0H1T]

Software RAID even with a RAID level using parity, like RAID 5, wouldn't even pull 10% CPU in the worst of cases. Modern CPU's crunch though such simple maths.

If you're using RAID 1 or RAID 0, then you're CPU might be taxed 0.5/1% maybe 3% at the very worst.

To put it in perspective, I'm running 6 VM's on a machine using "Software RAID" with a 6 drive RAID 10 and a 2 drive RAID 0 and the CPU sits at 5/20% depending on what the VM's are doing.

Edit - sorry about that I meant the disk at 100% & much more CPU cycles than hardware RAID, but even then 3% is very low certainly as I've observed

 

[dave_the_nerd]

ZFS is "Software RAID." (Speaking of parity calculations.)

Most large SANs with hundreds of disks, are using software to virtualize a single LUN with bits spread across multiple SAS controllers, RAID groups, and storage tiers. (So, essentially, software RAID. Whether you trust EMC's programmers more than you trust Microsoft's is your call.)

Software RAID is not automatically bad, I guess is my point.