The Southbridge Battle: nforce 6 MCP vs. ICH7 vs. ICH8

What Intel Matrix RAID Does

Intel's Matrix Storage Technology supports the concurrent operation of multiple RAID arrays across the same set or varying hard drives. The image above shows a basic example using two hard drives. You can setup a secure RAID 1 array across both hard drives, utilizing 30% of the total capacity. This array would be perfectly suitable to host your digital assets such as photos, videos, music or project files. Should one of the drives fail, the content would still be on the second drive. In addition to that, you can install a second RAID array across the same drives, let's say a RAID 0. This would provide a high-performance environment for your operating system and temporary files. A faulty drive hence would destroy them, but your important data would be protected by the RAID 1.

In our example, we created both a RAID 0 and a RAID 5 across our set of four hard drives: