ICH9R Linux Support - Fake or Real?

[shri]

Is the raid support on current Intel motherboards using the ICH9R real (i.e. hardware) or fake (i.e. software)?

Curious about this, as they seem to offer RAID 10 support, but several Linux forums insist that its fake and software drivers will be needed to run this.

If its fake, I assume one would be better of going with a 3Ware / Highpoint dedicated RAID controller?

[DVDGuy]

Do not bother with the chipset as it is a software raid (bios driven) and not hardware. ICH9R might also be a performance bottleneck as previous versions of the ICH* have been throttled by Intel.

You should be able to do a RAID 10 fairly simply...

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sd[ab]1
mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sd[cd]1
mdadm --create /dev/md3 --chunk=64 --level=0 --raid-devices=3 /dev/md[01]

No need to use dedicated hardware for RAID 0 / 1 .. only RAID 5 or 6 or complex setups.