Dell EMC Server Administrator Storage Management 9.1

Hardware and software RAID

RAID can be implemented with either hardware or software. A system using hardware RAID has a RAID controller that implements the RAID levels and processes data reads and writes to the physical disks. When using software RAID provided by the operating system, the operating system implements the RAID levels. For this reason, using software RAID by itself can slow the system performance. You can, however, use software RAID along with hardware RAID volumes to provide better performance and variety in the configuration of RAID volumes. For example, you can mirror a pair of hardware RAID 5 volumes across two RAID controllers to provide RAID controller redundancy.