ASRock 990FX Extreme4 RAID Installation Guide - Page 2

1. AMD BIOS RAID Installation Guide AMD BIOS RAID Installation Guide is an instruction for you to configure RAID functions by using the onboard FastBuild BIOS utility under BIOS environment. After you make a SATA3 driver diskette, press or to enter BIOS setup to set the option to RAID mode by following the detailed instruction of the "User Manual" in our support CD or "Quick Installation Guide", then you can start to use the onboard RAID Option ROM Utility to configure RAID. 1.1 Introduction to RAID The term "RAID" stands for "Redundant Array of Independent Disks", which is a method combining two or more hard disk drives into one logical unit. For optimal performance, please install identical drives of the same model and capacity when creating a RAID set. RAID 0 (Data Striping) RAID 0 is called data striping that optimizes two identical hard disk drives to read and write data in parallel, interleaved stacks. It will improve data access and storage since it will double the data transfer rate of a single disk alone while the two hard disks perform the same work as a single drive but at a sustained data transfer rate. WARNING!! Although RAID 0 function can improve the access performance, it does not provide any fault tolerance. Hot-Plug any HDDs of the RAID 0 Disk will cause data damage or data loss. RAID 1 (Data Mirroring) RAID 1 is called data mirroring that copies and maintains an identical image of data from one drive to a second drive. It provides data protection and increases fault tolerance to the entire system since the disk array management software will direct all applications to the surviving drive as it contains a complete copy of the data in the other drive if one drive fails. RAID 0+1 RAID 0+1 is a RAID level used for both replicating and sharing data among disks. The minimum number of disks required to implement this level of RAID is 3 (first, numbered chunks on all disks are built - like in RAID 0 - and then every odd chunk number is mirrored with the next higher even neighbor) but it is more common to use a minimum of 4 disks. The difference between RAID 0+1 and RAID 10 is the location of each RAID system - RAID 0+1 is a mirror of stripes. The usable capacity of a RAID 0+1 array is (N/2) . Smin, where N is the total number of drives (must be even) in the array and Smin is the capacity of the smallest drive in the array. RAID 5 (Block Striping with Distributed Parity) RAID 5 stripes data and distributes parity information across the physical drives along with the data blocks. This 2