Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC) RAID Configuration Capabilities for Windows*
Content Type: Product Information & Documentation | Article ID: 000101205 | Last Reviewed: 05/19/2025
The following information outlines the RAID configuration features and functionality supported by Intel® VROC, including the Intel® VROC sub-products: Intel® VROC (VMD NVMe* RAID), Intel® VROC (SATA RAID) and Intel® VROC (Non-VMD NVMe* RAID). To learn about specific features supported by each Intel® VROC sub-product, refer to the following resources:
| Intel® VROC Features | RAID configuration is one of the features of the Intel® VROC family of products. To learn about other features of Intel® VROC, refer to the Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC) Technical Product Specification for Windows*. |
The Intel® VROC family of products provides support for a single RAID management utility: the Intel® VROC Graphical User Interface (GUI) application for Windows*. This single Intel® VROC GUI application will display all supported controllers: SATA/sSATA/tSATA, Intel® Volume Management Device (Intel® VMD) controllers and/or (for Intel® VROC (Non-VMD NVMe* RAID) supported Intel NVMe* SSDs drives attached to them. The Intel® VROC GUI management tool will display each different controller and show all disks attached to that controller. The Intel® VROC GUI application will allow creating, deleting, and monitoring devices, RAID arrays and volumes on drives connected to the SATA, sSATA, tSATA and Intel® VMD controllers.
The Intel® VROC family of products provides the ability to change strip size on existing volumes (migration required). Learn more about the Intel® VROC various strip sizes support in Intel® Virtual RAID on CPU (Intel® VROC) Various Strip Sizes Support.
The Intel® VROC family of products provides support for Disk Coercion. When a RAID volume is created, this feature will analyze the physical disks and will automatically adjust (round down) the capacity of the disks to 95% of the smallest physical disk. This allows for variances in the physical disk capacities from different vendors. The Intel® VROC utilities (Pre-OS, Windows* GUI and CLI) provide an option to manually override this to be able to use all available disk space.
For Intel® VROC RAID volumes, it is recommended a minimum RAID volume size of 100 Megabytes. Creating a RAID volume smaller than 100 Megabytes may result in unexpected behavior. With such small sized volumes, actions resulting in rebuild or migration may not be reflected in the Intel® VROC GUI application. Such actions can take just milliseconds and the refresh rate of the Intel® VROC GUI application to collect volume/array/drive information is every second so it may not be able to catch all the notifications. This issue only affects the Intel® VROC GUI display of notifications. The operation of the volume is not affected and the actions perform correctly.
The Intel® VROC family of products will honor all FUA commands received from the operating system. This ensures that the cache on the attached drive is flushed when the command is received. This can have a negative impact on performance. For customers who are willing to accept the risk of potential data loss, they can improve the overall platform performance by having Intel® VROC ignore FUA commands received. This is done by creating the following Microsoft* registry keys:
It is left to the administrator making the change to know how to open the Windows* Registry Editor, how to modify the entries, and properly save the updates.
The Intel® VROC family of products supports the ability to move all the drives that make up a recognized RAID volumes between supported homogeneous controllers or platforms. This includes both Intel® VROC (VMD NVMe* RAID) and Intel® VROC (SATA RAID).
For Intel® VROC, the new environment that the old Intel® VROC RAID volume is being moved to must match the configuration of the old platform/environment.
| RAID Volume Roaming between Linux* and Windows* | The Intel® VROC family of products supports the ability to move RAID data volumes (configured appropriately) between Linux* and Windows* environments. The RAID data volumes will be recognized and available for use. This also applies to a manufacturing environment where the RAID volume created for the operating system installation needs to support either a Windows* environment or a Linux* environment. |
The Intel® VROC family of products supports the ability to install to and to boot from a single pass-thru drive (not part of a RAID array or volume). Intel® VROC will also be able to support a platform’s power management states (such as Power-on, Restart, Sleep and Hibernate) on single pass-thru drives that contain the operating system.
The Intel® VROC family of products supports the ability to recognize a failed drive re-inserted into the system. If the array is properly configured, Intel® VROC will attempt to bring the drive into the array and rebuild the volume with that drive. If not, Intel® VROC will mark the drive as failed or offline in the Intel® VROC GUI application.
The Intel® VROC family of products is able to update the name of a RAID volume in the normal state when requested by the Intel® VROC GUI application or the Command Line Interface (CLI) utility.