Asus P5WD2 Motherboard Installation Guide - Page 130

5.4 RAID configurations The motherboard comes with the Intel® ICH7R Southbridge 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 1 0 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. R A I D 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. 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 ICH7R chip allows you to setup RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 functions to improve both system performance and data safety. You can also combine two RAID sets to get higher performance, capacity, or fault tolerence provided by different RAID functions. For example, RAID 0 and RAID 1 set can be created by using only two identical hard 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 CD to a floppy disk before you install an operating system to the selected hard disk drive. Refer to section "5.6 Creating a RAID driver disk" for details. 5-16 Chapter 5: Software support