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GA-K8N Ultra-9 Motherboard - 66 -
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4-1-4 Serial ATA BIOS Setting Utility Introduction
RAID Levels
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a method of combining two hard disk drives into one logical
unit. The advantage of an Array is to provide better performance or data fault tolerance. Fault tolerance is
achieved through data redundant operation, where if one drives fails, a mirrored copy of the data can be
found on another drive. This can prevent data loss if the operating system fails or hangs. The individual disk
drives in an array are called members. The configuration information of each member is recorded in the
reserved sector that identifies the drive as a member. All disk members in a formed disk array are recognized
as a single physical drive to the operating system.
Hard disk drives can be combined together through a few different methods. The different methods are
referred to as different RAID levels. Different RAID levels represent different performance levels, security
levels and implementation costs. The RAID levels which the nVIDIA
®
nForce4 Ultra chipset supports
are RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and JBOD.
RAID 0 (Striping)
RAID 0 reads and writes sectors of data interleaved between multiple drives. If any disk member fails, it
affects the entire array. The disk array data capacity is equal to the number of drive members times the
capacity of the smallest member. The striping block size can be set from 4KB to 128KB. RAID 0 does
not support fault tolerance.
RAID 1 (Mirroring)
RAID 1 writes duplicate data onto a pair of drives and reads both sets of data in parallel. If one of the
mirrored drives suffers a mechanical failure or does not respond, the remaining drive will continue to function.
Due to redundancy, the drive capacity of the array is the capacity of the smallest drive. Under a RAID 1
setup, an extra drive called the spare drive can be attached. Such a drive will be activated to replace a failed
drive that is part of a mirrored array. Due to the fault tolerance, if any RAID 1 drive fails, data access will not
be affected as long as there are other working drives in the array.
RAID 0+1 (Striping + Mirroring)
RAID 0+1 combines the performance of data striping (RAID 0) and the fault tolerance of disk mirroring (RAID
1). Data is striped across multiple drives and duplicated on another set of drives.
JBOD (Spanning)
A spanning disk array is equal to the sum of the all drives when the drives used are having different capacities.
Spanning stores data onto a drive until it is full, then proceeds to store files onto the next drive in the array.
When any disk member fails, the failure affects the entire array. JBOD is not really a RAID and does not
support fault tolerance.