Asus M2N4-SLI Computer Hardware User Manual


 
5-16 Chapter 5: Software support
5.4 RAID congurations
The motherboard comes with the NVIDIA
®
SLI Southbridge RAID controllers
that allow you to congure IDE and 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.
RAID 1+0 is a striped conguration with each stripe a RAID 1 array of
drives. It combines the features of both RAID 1 and RAID 0. Fault tolerance
is provided through
mirroring
while adding performance through
striping
.
This offers higher performance than a RAID 1 conguration but at a much
higher cost. A minimum of four hard disk drives is required 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.