Is every onboard RAID fake RAID?

On almost all lower end motherboards on-board RAID will be "Fake" raid. It is possible however to get a motherboard with a dedicated hardware RAID controller. For instance a lot of Supermicro boards come with a dedicated RAID controller built onto the board.

As already mentioned, yours has the Intel C236 chipset which comes with "Intel Rapid Storage Technology". I came across a system with this not too long ago and was bitten by the fact that the system had self-upgraded to Windows 10, which the management software was not supported on. The utility would not run and this controller has no real BIOS interface where you can manage the array like most hardware controllers. The Intel RAID format is fairly consistent and supported by Linux tools, so I tried to rebuild using that but gave up in the end.

It's partly down to personal preference, but I would always choose software RAID (i.e. provided by the OS) if possible over Fake Raid, primarily for the following 2 reasons -

• Moving the disks to new hardware will normally 'just work'. You're not going to have to find a system with the same motherboard or fake raid chip.
• Managing the array can be done with the tools in the OS, rather than relying on continued support for software which is usually badly supported in the first place. In most cases it's also trivial to rebuild the array by simply connecting the disks to a different system running the same family of operating system or booting of a live CD.

(Or course this mainly applies to Linux/Unix operating systems that have mdraid/ZFS/etc. Not sure of the current status of RAID in Windows - especially that which can be booted from?)

"Fake RAID" is nothing more than a software RAID done via a proprietary binary driver/blob. Any cache-less on-board RAID controller is a (near useless) fake RAID, made gluing together a SATA/SAS controller and said opaque driver.

Its lone advantage over "pure" software RAID is the ability to present a single device for BIOS booting. Its disadvantages are much bigger, mainly:

• you run untrusted code in the critical I/O path;
• low compatibility with other boards.

With such a controller, I generally disable RAID functionality and I use software RAID on the physical disks, basically using the SATA/SAS controller as is.

You can argue than even "hardware RAID" cards really are nothing more than a specific software running on proprietary hardware, and in a sense this is very true. However, good RAID cards have a critical features: a powerloss-protected writeback cache, which greatly increases random writes performance and parity-based RAID speed. For more information, give a look here