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Intel Serial ATA RAID
The ICH7-R supports the following RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives) levels:
•
RAID 0
- data striping. Multiple physical drives can be teamed together to create one logical
drive. As data is written or retrieved from the logical drive, both drives operate in parallel,
thus increasing the throughput. The ICH7-R allows for more than two drives to be used in a
RAID 0 configuration.
•
RAID 1
- data mirroring. Multiple physical drives maintain duplicate sets of all data on
separate disk drives. Level 1 provides the highest data reliability because two complete
copies of all information are maintained. The ICH7-R allows for two or four drives to be
used in a RAID 1 configuration.
•
RAID 0+1 (or RAID 10)
- data striping and mirroring. RAID 0+1 combines multiple
mirrored drives (RAID 1) with data striping (RAID 0) into a single array. This provides
the highest performance with data protection. Data is striped across all mirrored sets.
RAID 0+1 utilizes several drives to stripe data (increased performance) and then
makes a copy of the striped drives to provide redundancy. The mirrored disks eliminate
the overhead and delay of parity.
•
RAID 5
- distributed parity. RAID Level 5 stripes data at a block level across several drives
and distributes parity among the drives; no single disk is devoted to parity. Because parity
data is distributed on each drive, read performance tends to be lower than other RAID
types. RAID 5 requires the use of three or four drives.
Discrete Serial ATA Interface (Optional)
As a manufacturing option, the board provides a Silicon Image Sil 3114 Serial ATA (SATA)
controller and four connectors (that support one device per connector) for SATA devices. These
connectors are in addition to the four SATA connectors of the ICH7-R SATA interface.
The Sil 3114 controller uses the PCI bus for data transfer and provides a maximum data transfer
rate of up to 1.5 Gbits/sec. The discrete SATA interface supports the following RAID levels:
• RAID 0
• RAID 1
• RAID 0+1
PCI Express Connectors
The board provides the following PCI Express connectors:
• One PCI Express x16 connector. The x16 interface supports simultaneous (full duplex)
transfers up to 8 GBytes/sec. Single-ended (half duplex) transfers are supported at up to
4 GBytes/sec.
• One Secondary PCI Express x16/x4 bus add-in card connector: The board provides a PCI
Express add-in card connector in the form of a physical x16 connector with electrical routing
of
x4. It is important to note that this connector is an electrical equivalent of a PCI Express x4
bus
add-in card connector. This connector supports x4 and x1 PCI Express add-in cards.
• One PCI Express x1 connector. The x1 interface supports simultaneous transfers up to
500 MBytes/sec.
