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4-12 Chapter 4: Software support
Chapter 4
4.5 RAID congurations
The motherboard comes with the Intel
®
P55 chipset that allows you to congure Serial ATA
hard disk drives as RAID sets. The motherboard supports the following RAID congurations:
RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10 and RAID 5.
• You must install Windows
®
XP Service Pack 2 or later versions before using Serial
ATA hard disk drives. The Serial ATA RAID feature is available only if you are using
Windows
®
XP SP2 or later versions.
• Due to Windows
®
XP / Vista limitation, a RAID array with the total capacity over 2TB
cannot be set as a boot disk. A RAID array over 2TB can only be set as a data disk
only.
• If you want to install a Windows
®
operating system to a hard disk drive included in a
RAID set, you have to create a RAID driver disk and load the RAID driver during OS
installation. Refer to section 4.6 Creating a RAID driver disk for details.
4.5.1 RAID denitions
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 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.
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.
Intel
®
Matrix Storage. The Intel
®
Matrix Storage technology supported by the PCH chip
allows you to create a RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10* function to improve both
system performance and data safety. You can also combine two RAID sets to get higher
performance, capacity, or fault tolerance provided by the difference RAID function. For
example, RAID 0 and RAID 1 set can be created by using only two identical hard disk drives.