3Ware 7000-2 User Guide - Page 87

Windows® 98/ME Installation Partition and format other devices Note: If you have disks or disk arrays other than your boot device on the ATA RAID controller, you must partition and format them before they can be written to or read from. 1 If you have other disk units to partition, run fdisk by selecting Run...from the Start menu and typing fdisk in the dialog. 2 Restart the system again and format each device. RAID array initialization RAID 0 arrays do not need to be initialized and are immediately available for use with full performance when created. RAID 1 and 10 arrays are not initialized when created and are immediately available for use with full performance when created. The first time the array is verified (via the BIOS or 3ware 3DM), the array is initialized. Initialization results in data from one disk (the disk on the lower channel number) being copied to the other drive. In RAID 10 arrays, data from one half of the array is copied to the other half. After the initial verification, subsequent verifies to a RAID 1 or 10 array result in the data from one drive (or set of drives) being compared to the other drive (or set of drives). RAID 5 arrays are immediately initialized after being created in the BIOS by writing zeroes to all array members. The user can reboot the system before this is complete in order to use the RAID 5 array immediately. Once booted to the operating system, the RAID 5 array goes into initialization mode after a delay of up to ten minutes. The advantage of this procedure is that the RAID 5 array can be used immediately, but it will not be fault tolerant until the initialization is complete. The disadvantage of this is that it takes longer www.3ware.com 87