Asus M2N Computer Hardware User Manual


 
5-8 Chapter 5: Software support
5.3 RAID congurations
The motherboard comes with the NVIDIA
®
MediaShield™ RAID controllers that
allow you to congure Serial ATA hard disk drives as RAID sets. The motherboard
supports the following RAID congurations.
RAID 0 (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. Use of two new identical hard disk drives
is required for this setup.
RAID 1 (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 conguration provides data protection and
increases fault tolerance to the entire system. Use two new drives or use an
existing drive and a new drive for this setup. The new drive must be of the same
size or larger than the existing drive.
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 conguration you get
all the benets of both RAID 0 and RAID 1 congurations. Use four new hard disk
drives or use an existing drive and three new drives for this setup.
RAID 5
stripes both data and parity information across three or more hard
disk drives. Among the advantages of RAID 5 conguration include better
HDD performance, fault tolerance, and higher storage capacity. The RAID
5 conguration is best suited for transaction processing, relational database
applications, enterprise resource planning, and other business systems. Use a
minimum of three identical hard disk drives for this setup.
JBOD (Spanning)
stands for Just a Bunch of Disks and refers to hard disk drives
that are not yet congured as a RAID set. This conguration 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
benets.
If you want to boot the system from a hard disk drive included in a RAID set,
copy rst the RAID driver from the support CD to a oppy disk before you install
an operating system to a selected hard disk drive. Refer to section “5.6 Creating
a RAID driver disk” for details.