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Chapter 5: VIA VT8237 SATA RAID Setup Guide
VIA RAID Configurations
The motherboard includes a high performance Serial ATA RAID controller
integrated in the VIA VT8237 Southbridge chipset. It supports RAID 0, RAID
1 and JBOD with two independent Serial ATA channels.
RAID:
(Redundant Array of Independent Disk Drives) use jointly several hard
drives to increase data transfer rates and data security. It depends on the number
of drives present and RAID function you select to fulfill the seurity or perfor-
mance pruposes or both.
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.
JBOD:
(Just a Bunch of Drives) Also known as “Spanning”. Two or more hard
drives are required. Several hard disk types configured as a single hard disk. The
hard drives are simply hooked up in series. This expands the capacity of your
drive and results in a useable total capacity. However, JBOD will not increase
any performance or data security.
Install the Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks
The VIA VT8237 Southbridge chipset supports Serial ATA hard disk drives. For
optimal performance, install identical drives of the same model and capacity
when creating a RAID set.
•
If you are creating a RAID 0 (striping) array of performance, use two
new drives.
•
If you are creating a RAID 1 (mirroring) array for protection, you can
use two new drives or use an existing drive and a new drive (the new
drive must be of the same size or larger than the existing drive). If you
use two drives of different sizes, the smaller capacity hard disk will be
the base storage size. For example, one hard disk has an 80 GB storage
capacity and the other hard disk has 60 GB storage capacity, the
maximum storage capacity for the RAID 1 set is 60 GB.
Chapter 5 VIA VT8237 SATA RAID Setup Guide
