5-28 Chapter 5: Software support
If you want to boot the system from a hard disk drive included in a
created RAID set, copy rst the RAID driver from the support CD to a
oppy disk before you install an operating system to the selected hard
disk drive. Refer to section “5.6 Creating a RAID driver disk” for details.
5.4 RAID congurations
The motherboard comes with the Intel
®
ICH7R Southbridge 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 10 is
data striping
and
data mirroring
combined without parity
(redundancy data) having to be calculated and written. With the RAID
10 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.
Intel
®
Matrix Storage. The Intel
®
Matrix Storage technology supported by
the ICH7R chip allows you to create a RAID 0 and a RAID 1 set using only
two identical hard disk drives. The Intel
®
Matrix Storage technology creates
two partitions on each hard disk drive to create a virtual RAID 0 and RAID
1 sets. This technology also allows you to change the hard disk drive
partition size without losing any data.