Quote Originally Posted by piquadrat View Post
Soft raid in Linux is better than almost all fake raids you can find on todays motherboards.
the performance characteristics are mixed so i guess i should shy away from making blanket recommendations... but i was trying to keep things simple.

motherboard "fake raids" do have some minor advantages over OS-specific software RAIDs. since the motherboard RAIDs are recognized by the BIOS you can boot from the RAID array. also the format of the array is not OS-specific, and since intel provides drivers across platforms this enables access to the RAID array across operating systems.

that said, RAID functionality for motherboard chipsets such as intel's ICH10R are ultimately implemented in the OS driver, so they are functionally the same as an OS-specific software RAID, the question is who has the best software. i've seen a number of good things written about intel's implementation. for basic read performance, particularly in RAID 0 or 1, intel's controllers actually outperform some well-respected discrete cards. (reference)

but once you start using RAID5/6, which requires constant XORing, especially in the case of a degraded array, a good dedicated controller will win over any software solution.