Asus P5E WS PROFESSIONAL User Manual - Page 140

5.4 RAID configurations The motherboard comes with two RAID controllers that allow you to configure Serial ATA hard disk drives as RAID sets. • The Intel® ICH9R Southbridge RAID includes a high performance SATA RAID controller that supports RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, and RAID 5 for six independent Serial ATA channels. • Marvell® 88SE6145 RAID. Enabled by Marvell® 88SE6145 controller, Marvell® RAID extends the advantages of software RAID beyond internal hard disk drives to external disks or external, port-multiplier enabled enclosures 5.4.1 RAID definitions 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 configuration 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 configuration include better HDD performance, fault tolerance, and higher storage capacity. The RAID 5 configuration 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* configuration you get all the benefits of both RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations. 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 ICH9R 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. If you want to boot the system from a hard disk drive included in a created RAID set, copy first the RAID driver from the support DVD to a floppy disk before you install an operating system to the selected hard disk drive. Refer to section "5.5 Creating a RAID driver disk" for details. 5-28 Chapter 5: Software support