Asus K8N-E Computer Hardware User Manual


 
ASUS K8N-E Deluxe motherboard
5-19
5.5 RAID configurations
The motherboard includes the Silicon Image SATARaid™ Sil3114
controller chipset and the NVIDIA
®
RAID controller integrated in the
NorthBridge to support Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID)
configurations. The following defines the supported RAID set
configurations:
RAID 0 (called data striping) optimizes two identical hard disk drives to
read and write data in parallel, interleaved stacks. Two hard disks perform
the same work as a single drive but at a sustained data transfer rate,
double that of a single disk alone, thus improving data access and
storage.
RAID 1 (called data mirroring) copies and maintains an identical image of
data from one drive to a second drive. If one drive fails, the disk array
management software directs all applications to the surviving drive as it
contains a complete copy of the data in the other drive. This RAID
configuration provides data protection and increases fault tolerance to the
entire system.
RAID 0+1 is data striping and data mirroring combined without parity
(redundancy data) having to be calculated and written. The advantage of
RAID 0 + 1 is fast data access (like RAID 0), but with the ability to loose
one drive and have a complete duplicate surviving drive or set of drives
(like RAID 1).
RAID 5 stripes both data and parity information across three or more hard
disk drives. RAID 5 is seen by many as the ideal combination of good
performance, good fault tolerance, and high capacity and storage capacity.
It is best suited for transaction processing, relational database
applications, enterprise resource planning and other business systems.
RAID 10 is implemented as a striped array whose segments are RAID 1
arrays. It has the same fault tolerance as RAID 1 and has the same
overhead for fault-tolerance as mirroring alone. Its high input/output rates
are achieved by striping RAID 1 segments. Under some circumstances, a
RAID 10 array can sustain multiple simultaneous drive failure.
JBOD stands for Just a Bunch of Disks or also called spanning, refers to
hard disks that are not yet configured according to RAID. The JBOD
configuration stores the same data redundantly on multiple disks that
appear as a single disk on the operating system. Spanning does not
deliver any advantage over using separate disks independently and does
not provide fault tolerance or performance benefits of RAID.