Intel Matrix RAID
RAID Recovery - Intel Matrix RAID
Intel matrix RAID was first introduced to Intel RAID BIOS based on the ICH6R “South Bridge” chipset. It has always been used with trailing ‘R’ at the end of chipset name which has ensured that Matrix RAID technology can also use the same. Intel Matrix RAID is quite old technology and like all RAID levels, it requires two or multiple physical hard disks but operating system takes them as single hard disk.
One of the key attribute of Intel Matrix has that different areas of every disk can be assigned to a various arrays running different Standard RAID levels. On the contrary, other software /BIOS RAID controllers don’t have. Now, different RAID levels such as RAID 0, 1, 10 and 5 are supported in the ICH10R.
Intel prefers putting the operating system, data and some critical application programs on RAID volume 1 because protection against losing the configured OS, programs and data are more significant than only improving performance. RAID 0 is used in Matrix RAID only when working with large files, for example, video while editing. It also used for non-critical files where fast storage will increase and improve the performance, for example, swap files. Matrix RAID can also be used on Linux, but Intel does not offer a graphical utility to configure the arrays or inform the users about disk failure.
The Intel Matrix storage Technology:
Intel Matrix RAID, the latest technology, is considered to the best solution which offers the highest disk performance to RAID 0 and provides benefits for RAID 1’s data redundancy. On the other hand, it is cost effective priced at common two hard disks. The matrix storage technology is also known as Matrix RAID.
Today, using RAID 0 and RAID 1 is quite affordable as they have minimum requirement of two had disks but by choosing them either we will get better performance or better data redundancy, we cannot have both till we think of RAID 5 or RAID 0+1. RAID 5 can be cost effective but again it requires at least three hard disks and RAID 0+1 is undoubtedly very costly. Here, Matrix Storage Technology is beneficial for improved performance and data redundancy.
