User guide

ASUS P4P800 Deluxe motherboard user guide 5-25
5.4 RAID 0 / RAID 1 / RAID 0+1 / JBOD
configurations
The motherboard includes VIA
®
VT6410 high performance IDE RAID
controller. It supports RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and JBOD with two
independent IDE channels. This controller also complies with Scatter/
Gather host DMA mechanism of Programming Interface for Bus Master
IDE Controller Revision 1.0 and builts 64 levels of pre-fetch and write
buffer inside to improve the transfer rate. The Dual channel master mode
hard disk controller supports up to four Enhanced IDE devices.
RAID 0 (called 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.
RAID 1 (called 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.
RAID 0+1 is data striping and data mirroring combined without parity
(redundancy data) having to be calculated and written. The advantage of
RAID 0 + 1 is fast data access (like RAID 0), but with the ability to loose
one drive and have a complete duplicate surviving drive or set of drives
(like RAID 1).
JBOD (for “just a bunch of disks” or sometimes “just a bunch of drives”) is
officially termed as “spanning”. This is used to refer to a computer’s hard
disks that haven’t been configured according the RAID system to increase
fault tolerance and improved data access performance. This RAID system
stores the same data redundantly on multiple drives by combining the
drives into one larger logical drive.
For more information about the VIA
®
VT6410 RAID controller, refer to
the VIA
®
VT6410, IDE RAID Controller user manual found in
“\Manual\IAA RAID Manual.doc” of the support CD.