RAID in the NVMe Era

Find out about Microchip’s approach to accelerating NVMe RAID systems.

William G. Wong

Mark Anthony

Related To:

Electronic Design

Nov. 25, 2025

What you'll learn:

What is RAID?
Why RAID is different with NVMe.
How Microchip’s RAID accelerator works with NVMe systems.

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RAID, or “redundant array of independent disks,” uses redundancy to provide a more robust disk-drive array capable of operation even with the loss of a drive (Fig. 1). RAID 1 replicates data with a 50% overhead. RAID 5 and 6 are more common in larger arrays with less overhead as more drives are added to the mix, but there’s a tradeoff in performance.

1. These are the most popular redundant RAID configurations. RAID 1 mirrors data while RAID 5 and 6 add parity so that the loss of one or two drives, respectively, doesn’t result in loss of data. Damaged drives can be replaced, and the information is able to be recreated from the remaining drives.

Mark Anthony, Product Line Manager at Microchip Technology, talks about the company’s SmartRAID 4300 Series, which is designed to accelerate the operation of RAID arrays implemented on NVM Express (NVMe) drives (Fig. 2). Microchip took a new approach in supporting RAID 5 and 6 with NVMe drives because the controller doesn’t sit between the host and the drives, as is the case with more conventional RAID controllers.

2. The SmartRAID 4300 Series accelerates RAID operations in NVMe systems.

Mark explains how the system works: The controller plugs into the same PCI Express (PCIe) system as the NVMe drives and provides parity support. Driver support handles data transfers and parity management.

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About the Author

William G. Wong

Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

You can visit my social media via these links:

I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.