- Apr 21, 2013
- 16
- 0
- 10,510
All modern Intel motherboards offer Matrix RAID, and it's starting to look better and better. 
Now just to keep the trolls away, I AM aware of the following:
Okay that said. I want a RAID 5 setup, mainly for the parity. I do have backups, I just want a system that hopefully saves me time if one of the drives kicks the bucket, and most importantly, will likely notice if my data is corrupted.
No backup is worth a flying fart if you do not notice data corruption - which can happen quite easily without parity.
What got me thinking however is that even though Matrix RAID has been around for almost ten years now, there are very few blogposts, howtos or anything similar on using it and any pitfalls.
One thing I noticed on the web is TLER. In order for a parity-enabled RAID to work reliably, the drives should report a read error in time instead of taking their time trying to fix it (which they normally do in a non-RAID environment).
There is extremely little data on what exactly is up with this. According to some sources, the RAID controller should tell the drives via S.M.A.R.T. upon each bootup that they are in an array, and enable TLER.
Some other sources say that on WD drives, you need to set this by hand in the drive firmware with some WD utility.
Some people even say that the whole TLER issue is obsolete.
I have two Samsung EcoGreen 154UI drives lying around, and am planning on getting another one somewhere. Now there was absolutely no info on the web on the TLER capability of these drives, so I'm thinking I should sell them and get WD ones, or anyway ones with known TLER support.
What I would like from my RAID setup is:
My questions essentially are:
Now just to keep the trolls away, I AM aware of the following:
■ Matrix RAID is firmware RAID, handled by the CPU.
■ RAID is not a replacement for backups.
Okay that said. I want a RAID 5 setup, mainly for the parity. I do have backups, I just want a system that hopefully saves me time if one of the drives kicks the bucket, and most importantly, will likely notice if my data is corrupted.
No backup is worth a flying fart if you do not notice data corruption - which can happen quite easily without parity.
What got me thinking however is that even though Matrix RAID has been around for almost ten years now, there are very few blogposts, howtos or anything similar on using it and any pitfalls.
One thing I noticed on the web is TLER. In order for a parity-enabled RAID to work reliably, the drives should report a read error in time instead of taking their time trying to fix it (which they normally do in a non-RAID environment).
There is extremely little data on what exactly is up with this. According to some sources, the RAID controller should tell the drives via S.M.A.R.T. upon each bootup that they are in an array, and enable TLER.
Some other sources say that on WD drives, you need to set this by hand in the drive firmware with some WD utility.
Some people even say that the whole TLER issue is obsolete.
I have two Samsung EcoGreen 154UI drives lying around, and am planning on getting another one somewhere. Now there was absolutely no info on the web on the TLER capability of these drives, so I'm thinking I should sell them and get WD ones, or anyway ones with known TLER support.
What I would like from my RAID setup is:
■ Windows 8 should be able to boot up from the RAID array itself, I really don't want a dedicated boot drive at this point.
■ Not to fail from otherwise recoverable errors.
■ Tell me if my data is corrupted, or fix the corruption.
■ If one drive fails, and I pop in a new one, it should be able to rebuild unless a non-recoverable error happens on one of the other drives.
■ (hopefully) if the Motherboard fails, or I just replace it with a new one, another Intel Matrix implementation should be able to use the same array without reformatting. (I did read some successful accounts on the web, so thankfully it seems Matrix is usually compatible with itself.)
My questions essentially are:
■ Is anyone using Matrix RAID (5) on a modern, SB/IB motherboard? Is Matrix RAID capable of doing the above, or is it just a gimmick from Intel?
■ Anyone know anything about the TLER capability of the Samsung 154/155UI drives?
■ The x77 chipset is a consumer chipset, it should expect consumer drives. How does it fare? Does the Matrix RAID firmware use S.M.A.R.T. to query drive health? Does it set TLER on bootup?
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