Is every onboard RAID fake RAID?

I bought an MSI C236M workstation. It claims that it supports RAID 0/1/5/10. How can I decide what kind of RAID this is? Is it always "fake" RAID, or is there any chance that it is a true hardware RAID?

To my understanding it is better to use a software or a true hardware RAID, than these fake RAIDs coming with the motherboards... https://serverfault.com/a/522346/101323

Answer

On almost all lower end motherboards on-board RAID will be "Fake" raid. It is possible however to get a motherboard with a dedicated hardware RAID controller. For instance a lot of Supermicro boards come with a dedicated RAID controller built onto the board.

As already mentioned, yours has the Intel C236 chipset which comes with "Intel Rapid Storage Technology". I came across a system with this not too long ago and was bitten by the fact that the system had self-upgraded to Windows 10, which the management software was not supported on. The utility would not run and this controller has no real BIOS interface where you can manage the array like most hardware controllers. The Intel RAID format is fairly consistent and supported by Linux tools, so I tried to rebuild using that but gave up in the end.

It's partly down to personal preference, but I would always choose software RAID (i.e. provided by the OS) if possible over Fake Raid, primarily for the following 2 reasons -

• Moving the disks to new hardware will normally 'just work'. You're not going to have to find a system with the same motherboard or fake raid chip.


• Managing the array can be done with the tools in the OS, rather than relying on continued support for software which is usually badly supported in the first place. In most cases it's also trivial to rebuild the array by simply connecting the disks to a different system running the same family of operating system or booting of a live CD.

(Or course this mainly applies to Linux/Unix operating systems that have mdraid/ZFS/etc. Not sure of the current status of RAID in Windows - especially that which can be booted from?)