In order to have a RAID system on your PC, you will need two things: a RAID controller and at least two identical hard disk drives. If you want to setup a system differently from RAID0 or RAID1, more hard disk drives may be necessary, as we explained in the previous page. In this tutorial, we are assuming that you are going to build a RAID0 or a RAID 1 system, so we will be discussing a system with two hard disk drives from now on.

Nowadays, several motherboards come with an embedded RAID controller, making it very easy to setup a RAID system. All you will need are two identical hard disk drives (if your motherboard has RAID capability, of course).

The first thing you need to check is whether your motherboard has an embedded RAID controller or not. This information can be found in the manual that comes with your motherboard. The motherboard chipset (the south bridge chip also known as ICH, or I/O Controller Hub, on Intel chipsets, to be more exact), is in charge of controlling the hard disk ports of your motherboard. The south bridge chip of your motherboard needs to have an embedded RAID controller. On Intel chipsets, this chip needs to have the letter “R” in order to have this feature. For instance, the ICH7 chip does not have the RAID feature, while the ICH7R does. The same thing may happen with chipsets from other suppliers. For example, VIA VT8237R has RAID function while VT8237 doesn’t.

Some manufacturers call RAID function with a fancier name, such as “Intel Matrix Storage” or “NVIDIA MediaShield Storage.” Regardless of what name it has, it's the same thing.

If you don’t have your motherboard manual, click here to download it. If you don’t know your motherboard manufacturer and/or model, click here to learn how to discover this information.

Many motherboards have an extra chip providing more hard disk drive ports, usually from companies like SiliconImage, JMicron, Marvell, Promise, and HighPoint, just to name the most common ones. Usually this extra chip has an embedded RAID controller. If your motherboard chipset does not provide RAID function but your motherboard has an extra chip that does, you will need to install your hard disk drives to the ports attached to this chip instead of using the hard disk drive ports attached to the south bridge chip.

In Figure 3, you can see the detail of the Intel D975XBX2 motherboard that we will be using in this tutorial. This motherboard has a total of eight SATA-300 ports, four controlled by the chipset (Intel 975XBX, using ICH7R south bridge) and four controlled by the Marvell 88SE6145 chip. Both chips have an embedded RAID controller, but if the chipset was using a different south bridge chip (ICH7, for example) we could still use RAID, as the extra four SATA-300 ports have this feature.

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Figure 3: SATA ports found on Intel D975XBX2 motherboard

In situations like the one shown in Figure 3 – two RAID-enabled chips on the motherboard – the hard disk drives must be installed on the same port group. As you can see, Intel used black color on the ports connected to the chipset and blue color on the ports connected to the extra chip. Your two hard disk drives must be installed on ports with the same color. As the motherboard chipset supports RAID, we prefer to use the ports that are connected to the chipset (black ports in this example).

If your motherboard doesn’t have a RAID chip, you still can use a RAID system by buying an add-on RAID controller.

Let’s now talk about the installation process in detail.