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1. AMD BIOS RAID Installation Guide
AMD BIOS RAID Installation Guide is an instruction for you to configure RAID functions by using the onboard
FastBuild BIOS utility under BIOS environment. After you make a SATA / SATAII / SATA3 driver diskette, press <F2>
or <Del> to enter BIOS setup to set the option to RAID mode by following the detailed instruction of the “User Manual”
in our support CD or “Quick Installation Guide”, then you can start to use the onboard RAID Option ROM Utility to
configure RAID.
1.1 Introduction to RAID
The term “RAID” stands for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks”, which is a method combining two or more hard
disk drives into one logical unit. For optimal performance, please install identical drives of the same model and
capacity when creating a RAID set.
RAID 0 (Data Striping)
RAID 0 is called data striping that optimizes two identical hard disk drives to read and write data in parallel, interleaved
stacks. It will improve data access and storage since it will double the data transfer rate of a single disk alone while the
two hard disks perform the same work as a single drive but at a sustained data transfer rate.
WARNING!!
Although RAID 0 function can improve the access performance, it does not provide any fault tolerance. Hot-Plug any HDDs of the
RAID 0 Disk will cause data damage or data loss.
RAID 1 (Data Mirroring)
RAID 1 is called data mirroring that copies and maintains an identical image of data from one drive to a second
drive. It provides data protection and increases fault tolerance to the entire system since the disk array
management software will direct all applications to the surviving drive as it contains a complete copy of the data in
the other drive if one drive fails.
RAID 10 (Stripe Mirroring)
RAID 0 drives can be mirrored using RAID 1 techniques, resulting in a RAID 10 solution for improved performance
plus resiliency. The controller combines the performance of data striping (RAID 0) and the fault tolerance of disk
mirroring (RAID 1). Data is striped across multiple drives and duplicated on another set of drives.
RAID 5 (Block Striping with Distributed Parity)
RAID 5 stripes data and distributes parity information across the physical drives along with the data blocks. This
organization increases performance by accessing multiple physical drives simultaneously for each operation, as well
as fault tolerance by providing parity data. In the event of a physical drive failure, data can be re-calculated by the
