MS-7033 M-ATX Mainboard
4-2
Introduction
This section gives a brief introduction on the RAID-related background knowl-
edge and a brief introduction on VIA IDE RAID Host Controller. For users wishing to
install their VIA IDE RAID driver and RAID software, proceed to Installing Software
section.
Note: RAID option supports only one IDE channel with RAID 0/1 configuration.
RAID Basics
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a method of combining two
or more hard disk drives into one logical unit. The advantage of an Array is to provide
better performance or data fault tolerance. Fault tolerance is achieved through data
redundant operation, where if one drives fails, a mirrored copy of the data can be
found on another drive. This can prevent data loss if the operating system fails or
hangs. The individual disk drives in an array are called “members”. The configuration
information of each member is recorded in the “reserved sector” that identifies the
drive as a member. All disk members in a formed disk array are recognized as a single
physical drive to the operating system.
Hard disk drives can be combined together through a few different methods.
The different methods are referred to as different RAID levels. Different RAID levels
represent different performance levels, security levels and implementation costs.
The RAID levels which the VIA VT6410 SATA RAID Host Controller supports are RAID
0, RAID 1 & JBOD. The table below briefly introduce these RAID levels.
RAID Level No. of Drives Capacity Benefits
RAID 0 (Striping)
2 Number drives *
Smallest size
Highest performance without data protection
RAID 1 (Mirroring)
2 Smallest size Data protection
JBOD
(Spanning)
2 Sum of all drives No data protection and performance
improvement, but disk capacity is fully used.
RAID 0 (Striping)
RAID 0 reads and writes sectors of data interleaved between multiple drives.
If any disk member fails, it affects the entire array. The disk array data capacity is
equal to the number of drive members times the capacity of the smallest member. The
striping block size can be set from 4KB to 64KB. RAID 0 does not support fault
tolerance.
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