Does the Clevo P870DM-G have hardware or software RAID?

I remember a while back when looking at one of last year's Clevo laptops, in the online ad it claimed they use hardware RAID but when I asked in the OC Forums/SSD section, they told me unless the laptop has a dedicated RAID card then it's software RAID and can in no way be hardware RAID.

So what is the case with the latest P870DM-G? Is it hardware or software RAID?

 

It has hardware RAID

Software RAID is done in the OS.

RAID on the P870DM is done in the BIOS.

 

I thought it's firmware RAID?

 

Hardware RAID is RAID done by a dedicated hardware raid card or by the bios through the chipset which is also hardware raid.

Software raid is normally only done when the chipset doesn't support hardware raid. Storage Spaces is an example of software based raid.

 

Right, because when I mentioned this to the people on OC Forums, they said if it's not a dedicated hardware RAID card, it's software RAID. Period. They're like this is like a Hybrid RAID where the operations are handled by the CPU which causes a big latency / performance hit compared to a dedicated RAID card, but the actual RAID setup is done through the BIOS, hence why they claim it's a Hybrid RAID. What do you think of this?

I'm sure CLEVO advertising it as hardware RAID in the ad sort of tallies with your thoughts. Maybe they're wrong on OC forums

 

It is still hardware raid. However, they are right to some extent. A dedicated RAID card will have lower latency and all, however, it wouldn't make a difference in 99% of situations. We have M.2 SSDs that can do 2GB/S reads and 1GB/S+ writes. Also dedicated raid cards are more useful for people who raid 5+ disks. The standard intel rapid storage controller can do 5 drives I believe on desktops and 2-4 on laptops.

Some people require 10+ drives in RAID so they would use a dedicated RAID card. In our situation, the built-in raid option is perfectly fine.

 

I would consider RAID that is done without a dedicated RAID card as software RAID. A BIOS is still software, not hardware. With that said, you don't REALLY need a RAID card unless you're dealing with RAID5/6 or any other parity RAIDS.

 

It's a software RAID, even when done through firmware/BIOS. It generates significant CPU load, when operating. In a system with a hardware RAID, the computations are off-loaded to the RAID controller, thus having no impact on the CPU. Intel's Rapid Storage Technology is software RAID.

 

That's what the guys @ OC Forums said, exact same words

 

It's all Software RAID, when you think about it

The difference is that the BIOS Firmware uses the main CPU, and the RAID cards have their own processing core.

For the most part the CPU load on the BIOS Firmware today is minuscule as compared to ancient times when you could see the added load against the CPU.

That's where we get the "software RAID" (runs on main CPU) adds too much load to the CPU.

Now it's a fleeting load that won't affect anything else running.

There are still 2 main drawbacks to using a main CPU hosted RAID.

If the host OS crashes, you can corrupt the RAID volume / formatted disk. There are 2 disk checks you can do, the Intel RST Windows software has a integrity check you can manually run on the RAID, and the Windows OS dskchk can be run on the volume. I always do a quick chkdsk on the C partition in Windows if I crash or need to power off by holding the power button down.

The other drawback matters less in a laptop, as there is a built-in battery backup.

RAID cards usually can be optioned with an NVRAM battery backup that can survive OS reboots - the data stored in the NVRAM that wasn't written before the OS stopped can be written at the next boot.

In the past "software RAID" has gotten a bad name due to failures, but I haven't had a BIOS Firmware RAID fail in a very long time. I still maintain image backups of the RAID just in case, and use them for OS rollbacks when something wicked gets installed, but it's rare to hear of a RAID0 SSD fail and take down the volume.

Many years ago I made the first gamble of using a Software RAID, hosted in SunOS / Solaris - it came with the OS - and I used it for an IO intensive task - USENET news server - and it was still running 10 years later when I went to visit the client for another job. So, it's been a long time since I have worried about a software RAID failing

 

I think it's fair to separate it out as the three types as all are quite different:

Software raid - Run through the OS
Firmware raid - Run through the bios
Hardware raid - Dedicated chip and ram controlling the drives.

No notebooks ship with hardware raid due to the PCB and cooling requirements while offering no benefit really to notebook use cases.