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Systems & Data Center · Intermediate

Hardware RAID Controller

A dedicated adapter that implements RAID on its own processor, offloading parity calculation and often providing protected write cache.

Definition

Hardware RAID presents logical drives to the OS and can include battery- or flash-backed cache for write-back performance. Firmware and driver versions must be maintained, and arrays may be tied to the controller vendor.

Example

A PERC controller presents a RAID 6 virtual disk to the server's OS as one drive.

Exam tip

Software-defined storage such as ZFS, S2D and vSAN usually requires HBA or pass-through mode, not hardware RAID.

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