Hi,

I just wanted to know if any companies have started to offer hardware raid solutions for notebooks.

I noticed that alienware offered RAID in one of their lines of notebooks. So I called their sales rep and asked. He said oh yes we offer RAID with our notebook it is controlled by the BIOS. So I hung up the phone and thought about it for a second.

I realized controlling it through the BIOS doesn't really mean anything. So I started chatting with their chat support and asked what chipset was used to control the RAID and gave them the example of ICH8R. He could not answer it and told me to call corporate sales. I called them to finally find out their RAID solution is actually software RAID. I am not interested in software RAID.

So I again inquire with the almighty Tom's Hardware forums.

Does anyone know if any notebook/laptop manufacturers are offering notebooks with "real" hardware RAID? If so could you provide me with links to the manufacturers website as well as any other pertinent information you might think is worthy of noting.

Thanks,
Nick

.............

raid isn't designed for notebooks. notebooks can't take advantage of raid's benefits, dont have room for the additional drives, and have other bottlenecks.

jesus... everybody and their momma hears "OMFG RAID IS DA SHEEET!! I WANNA!!!" and jump on the "i have no clue what i'm doing" bandwagon.

Valis

Quoted for truth. Let's increase heat, power consumption, in turn decrease battery life, increase the size of the notebook, reduce the stability, and likely slightly increase the seek time of a system that already has rather bad seek times already, all for something that likely won't make the system noticeably faster even.

RAID on the desktop is questionable already, RAID in a notebook is just dumb.

Your best bet for a RAID laptop is to use a PCMCIA SATA card, and an external SATA housing that does RAID. This isn't cheap, and pretty much removes the mobility from your laptop to start with. Still, it's also capable of being used on a desktop, so it's not all bad.

In terms of running an OS off RAID on your laptop, the best you can expect is the ICH8R. If you're a home user, this is enough. If you're a corporate user, it's still enough. If you're a server administrator, you need a desktop server not a laptop...

hahahahahahahahaha lmao

the sony vaio vgn-bx670p55 has 200 GB on 2 drives allocated in RAID 0. I recently bought one; now I am getting possible read errors and may need to replace one of the drives. is it possible to reconfigure this to 2 non-raid physical drives?

chipset data:
North Bridge: Intel Calistoga i945GM/PM
South Bridge: Intel 82801GBM ICH7-M

Lots of high-end notebooks are shipping with onboard RAID now, mostly around the ICH8* controllers. I just got a Sony VGN-AR670 CTO. I wasn't interested in having RAID on it, or even two drives for that matter. However for some reason Sony won't allow you to spec the 1920x1200 HiColor display unless you configure a dual-drive build. And with such a build, it comes preconfigured in a RAID0 stripe.

So I spec'd dual 200GB drives and now have a 400GB C: partition... which I hate. Now I just need to figure out how to break up the drives, then reinstall Vista on one with a C: & D: partition, and Linux on the other.