Specifications

5-36 Chapter 5: Software support
5.4 RAID congurations
The motherboard comes with two RAID controllers that allow you to congure
Serial ATA hard disk drives as RAID sets.
•
AMD SB600 Southbridge RAID
includes a high performance SATA RAID
controller that supports RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 0+1 for four independent
SATA channels.
•
Marvell
®
6121 RAID
includes a high performance SATA RAID controller that
supports RAID 0 and RAID 1 for two independent SATA channels.
5.4.1 RAID denitions
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 conguration 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 0+1
is data striping and data mirroring combined without parity (redundancy
data) having to be calculated and written. With the RAID 0+1 conguration you get
all the benets of both RAID 0 and RAID 1 congurations. Use four new hard disk
drives or use an existing drive and three new drives for this setup.
If you want to boot the system from a hard disk drive included in a RAID set,
copy rst the RAID driver from the support DVD to a oppy disk/USB device
before you install an operating system to a selected hard disk drive. Refer to
section
5.6 Creating a RAID driver disk
for details.