| has gloss | eng: Intel Matrix RAID is a firmware RAID system, rather than hardware RAID or software RAID. It first appeared in the ICH6R "southbridge" chip. Intel has continued to use an R at the end of the southbridge's name (e.g. ICH9R instead of ICH9) to indicate when a southbridge contains their Matrix RAID technology and no other upgrades. Complicating the matter is that instead of "R," a "DO," "DH," etc has indicated a southbridge that combined RAID with non-RAID-related upgrades to the southbridge. Like all RAID, Intel Matrix RAID employs two or more physical hard disks which the operating system will treat as a single disk, in order to increase redundancy which avoids data loss (as all RAID levels except RAID 0 do), and/or to increase the speed at which data is written to and/or read from a disk. |
