StNolly :
jwk3 :
on my onboard raid it said that it would wipe/format all drives that I said to put into RAID0. it could be possible with separate RAID cards but probably not for onboard RAID (or fake RAID as people sometimes say). if you tell us your RAID card it would be much more helpful.
I wasn't aware that I needed a Raid card. my mobo is a Gigabyte 990 UD5. Cant that mobo handle the raid config?
You don't "need" a hardware RAID controller to put disks into RAID. Most Intel and AMD chipsets have what's called "firmware assisted raid" which is a firmware module (BIOS OPROM, or UEFI Driver) that exposes multiple disks as a single logical unit. Without this, the data on a RAID disk would be nonsense.
Firmware assisted RAID is simply a software RAID that can be booted. All of the heavy lifting for striping, mirroring, and calculating parity is done by the CPU through either the device driver or the firmware module.
True hardware RAID controllers do all of the heavy lifting on their own, offloading that work from the CPU. As a result of their more intricate nature they may have some features that are absent from firmware or software RAID, such as the ability to migrate or rebuild RAIDs without the operating system being aware of it. In some cases, they can do it without the system even being powered on.