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5-8 Chapter 5: Software support
5.3 RAID congurations
The motherboard comes with the NVIDIA
®
MediaShield™ RAID controllers that
allow you to congure Serial ATA hard disk drives as RAID sets. The motherboard
supports the following RAID congurations.
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 conguration 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 conguration you get
all the benets of both RAID 0 and RAID 1 congurations. 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 conguration include better
HDD performance, fault tolerance, and higher storage capacity. The RAID
5 conguration 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 congured as a RAID set. This conguration 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
benets.
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.