Asus P5GD2 P5GD2 user's manual - Page 121

5.5 RAID configurations The motherboard comes with the Silicon Image Sil3114, ITE 8212, and the Intel® ICH6R Southbride RAID controllers that allow you to configure IDE and Serial ATA hard disk drives as RAID sets. The motherboard supports the following RAID configurations. R A I D 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. R A I D 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. R A I D 0 + 1 is data striping and data mirroring combined without parity (redundancy data) having to be calculated and written. With the RAID 0+1 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. J B O D (Spanning) stands for J u s t a B u n c h o f D i s k s and refers to hard disk drives that are not yet configured as a RAID set. This configuration stores the same data redundantly on multiple disks that appear as a single disk on the operating system. Spanning does not deliver any advantage over using separate disks independently and does not provide fault tolerance or other RAID performance benefits. I n t e l® M a t r i x S t o r a g e . The Intel® Matrix Storage technology supported by the ICH6R chip allows you to create a RAID 0 and a RAID 1 set using 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. For more information on the Intel® Matrix Storage technology, visit http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/imst/ If you want to boot the system from a hard disk drive included in a RAID set, copy first the RAID driver from the support CD to a floppy disk before you install an operating system to a selected hard disk drive. Refer to section "5.6 Creating a RAID driver disk" for details. ASUS P5GD2 5-17