MSI G31M3 User Guide - Page 70

MS-7528 Mainboard ICH7R Introduction The ICH7R provides a hybrid solution that combines four independent SATAII ports for support of up to four Serial ATAII (Serial ATAII RAID) drives. Serial ATAII (SATAII) is the latest generation of the ATA interface. SATA hard drives deliver blistering transfer speeds up to 300MB/sec. Serial ATA uses long, thin cables, making it easier to connect your drive and improving the airflow inside your PC. The most outstanding features are: 1. Supports 300MB/s transfers with CRC error checking. 2. Supports Hot-plug-n-play feature. 3. Data handling optimizations including tagged command queuing, elevator seek and packet chain command. Intel® ICH7R offers RAID level 0 (Striping), RAID level 1 (Mirroring and Duplexing), RAID level 5 (Block Interleaved Distributed Parity), RAID level 10 (A Stripe of Mirrors) and Intel® Martix Storage Technology. RAID 0 breaks the data into blocks which are written to separate hard drives. Spreading the hard drive I/O load across independent channels greatly improves I/O performance. RAID 1 provides data redundancy by mirroring data between the hard drives and provides enhanced read performance. RAID 5 Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Level 5 is one of the most popular implementations of RAID. RAID 10 Not one of the original RAID levels, multiple RAID 1 mirrors are created, and a RAID 0 stripe is created over these. Intel Matrix RAID Technology is the advanced ability for two RAID volumes to share the combined space of two hard drives being used in unison. Important The least number of hard drives for RAID 0, RAID 1 or Matrix mode is 2. The least number of hard drives for RAID 10 mode is 4. And the maximum number of hard drives for RAID 5 mode is 3. All the information/volumes listed in your system might differ from the illustrations in this appendix. B-2