While drivers have been available for the Solid State Drives (SSD) commonly used in laptops and notebooks, RAID drivers were not available preventing most larger business from taking advantage of the new SSD technology.

One of the primary advantages of SSDs is that they are faster than a mechanical hard drive and they don’t need to be defragmented. SSD SATA drives can reach transfer speeds of up to 3.0 Gbps while supporting hot-plug with asynchronous signal recovery, software settings preservation, and device initiated power management.

RAID is Now Possible!

Intel has introduced a new Rapid Storage Technology RAID driver that adds SSD capability to SATA hard drives that customers of motherboards using the Intel chipset have be long waiting for.

Now Customers can use their SSDs in RAID configurations and still ensure that they meet all of the ATA-8 protocol requirements that will allow them to enable TRIM support on the data storage arrays for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7.

These new drivers are designed for motherboards that use both  Intel controllers and the Southbridge chipset. While not an official benchmark, from recent forum posts I read, overall performance is considerably better with the new drivers.

Still No Support for RAID 5

However, the new RAID drivers DO NOT support RAID 5 yet. Hopefully, that will be coming soon.