Asus PCI-DA2100 User Manual - Page 7

1 Chapter 1 Introduction The ASUS PCI-DA2100/-DA2200 is a PCI-to-SCSI RAID controller specifically designed to provide RAID 0, 1, 3 or 5 capability to any host system equipped with a Little Endian PCI Local Bus interface. All the RAID functions of ASUS PCI-DA2100/-DA2200 are performed by an Intel486(PCI-DA2100) or AMD 5x86(PCI-DA2200) CPU coupled with high-speed DRAMs and firmware in flash memory. In effect, it endows the host system with the highperformance and fault-tolerant disk storage operation of RAID technology. It is also an ideal solution for weaving several hard disks into one contiguous volume. The controller has comprehensive drive failure management that allows automatic reassignment of reserved blocks when a bad sector is encountered during a write. Hot-swapping is supported through automatic disconnection of a failed drive and detection of a reserved drive followed with background rebuilding of data. The controller also supports spare drive operation. Remarkably, all of these failure recovery procedures are transparent to the host system. The ASUS PCI-DA2100/-DA2200 has been designed with ease of integration and maintenance in mind. The major features are described in the next chapter. The controller already includes all the major operational requirements for a RAID subsystem. The overall features of a fully-built RAID subsystem will, however, depend on the actual components used and the creativity of the integrator. ASUS PCI-DA2100/PCI-DA2200 User's Manual 7