Asus M2N-L Computer Hardware User Manual


 
5-8 Chapter 5: Software support
5.4 RAID congurations
The motherboard comes with the NVIDIA
®
nForce
®
570 SLI MCP (MCP55P) RAID
utility 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 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 0+1 is a striping and data mirroring combined without parity (redundancy
data) having to be calculated and written. With the RAID 0+1 conguration you can
get all the benets of both RAID 0 and RAID 1 congurations. Use at least four
new hard disk drives for this setup.
JBOD (Spanning) stands for just a Bunch of Disks and refers to hard disk drivers
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.