What does it mean if a motherbord has "SATA RAID support"?

[Lourens]

What does it mean if a motherbord has "SATA RAID support"?

 

[Luigi]

It can support sata raid... Its too long to explain, but type RAID into wikipedia and you shall find your answer

 

[JN]

It basically means you can span your data across multiple hard disks for increased performance or fault tolerance if one of your disks fails.

 

[fruityness]

It's a useful feature to have, though you need at least 2 hard drives, the capacities of which can be effected depending on the type raid array you set up.

I'm rather lucky here, and have 3 seagate drives set up in a raid0 array, so the computer spreads the writing and reading of info across all 3 hard drives at the same time, and thereby greatly speeding up the read/write performance. The down side of raid0 being that if one drive dies, I loose all the info.

You can set up other types of raid array too, like raid5 - which is like raid0 (stripping) but with data parity, the idea being that if one drive dies then the info it contained can be rebuilt from the other 2 drives. Though I had this before (raid5), but found that over clocking and BSOD's caused the raid array to always want to check its data for errors, hence slowing down performance when it did this, annoying frankly. So I reinstalled windoze and went with the raid0.

 

[Rastalovich]

Can also mean, in mobo-manufacturer talk, that although u have 6 SATA ports, the hardware may only allow raid0/1/10, more via software.

What annoys me is raid on 1 mobo may not mean it`ll work on another.

It should be a standard imo.

 

[noobieocer]

raid is useful i haven't used it cause i haven't got that many hdds