Asus M3N WS Computer Hardware User Manual


 
ASUS M3N WS 4-35
4.4 RAID congurations
The motherboard comes with the NVIDIA GeForce 8200 chipset that allows you to
congure Serial ATA hard disk drives as RAID sets. The motherboard supports the
following RAID congurations: RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, RAID 5 and JBOD.
4.4.1 RAID denitions
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.
For Windows XP, If you want to boot the system from a hard disk drive included
in a RAID set, rst copy the RAID driver from the support DVD to a oppy disk
before you install an operating system to a selected hard disk drive. Refer to
section
4.5 Creating a RAID driver disk
for details.