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Chapter 3: Software support
3.3 RAID configurations
The motherboard comes with the following RAID solutions:
• The VIA VT8251 southbridge chipset comes with a built-in SATA RAID
controller that allows you to configure RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and JBOD
with four SATA hard disk drives.
• The JMicron chipset comes with a built-in SATA RAID controller that allows you
to configure RAID 0, RAID 1, and JBOD with two SATA hard disk drivers.
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 0+1 is data striping and data mirroring combined without parity (redundancy
data) having to be calculated and written. With the RAID 0+1 configuration you get
all the benefits of both RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations. Use four new hard disk
drives or use an existing drive and three new drives for this setup.
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.
JBOD (Spanning) stands for Just a Bunch of Disks and refers to hard disk drives
that are not yet configured as a RAID set. This 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 other RAID performance benefits.
If you use either Windows
®
XP or Windows
®
2000 operating system (OS), copy
first the RAID driver from the support CD to a floppy disk before creating RAID
configurations. Refer to section “3.5 Creating a RAID driver disk” for details.
3.3.1 Installing hard disks
The motherboard supports Serial ATA hard disk drives. For optimal performance,
install identical drives of the same model and capacity when creating a disk array.
• If you are creating a RAID 0 (striping) array for performance, use two new
drives.
• If you are creating a RAID 1 (mirroring) array for protection, you can use
two new drives or use an existing drive and a new drive (the new drive
must be of the same size or larger than the existing drive).