Specifications
3-10 Chapter 3: Software support
3.3 RAID congurations
The motherboard comes with the VIA
®
VT8237S RAID controller that allows you to
congure Serial ATA hard disk drives as RAID sets.
3.3.1 RAID denitions
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 conguration 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.
JBOD (Spanning) stands for Just a Bunch of Disks and refers to hard disk drives
that are not yet congured as a RAID set. This conguration 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 benets.
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 CD to a oppy disk before you install
an operating system to a selected hard disk drive. Refer to section “3.4 Creating
a RAID driver disk” for details.