1-5
Introduction
Installation Overview
To Install the Adaptec ATA RAID 1200A hardware and software,
follow these steps:
1
Install the Adaptec ATA RAID 1200A card in your system (see
Chapter 2
).
2
Connect ATA drives to the Adaptec ATA RAID 1200A card (see
Chapter 2
).
3
Create the first bootable array using the BIOS Array
Configuration Utility (see
Chapter 3
).
4
Install the appropriate software driver for your operating
system (see
Chapter 4
).
5
Install the Adaptec ATA RAID Management Software on your
system (see
Chapter 5
).
Defining RAID
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) offers outstanding
data availability, excellent performance, and high capacity. A
RAID is defined as:
■
Unified array
—Two or more hard drives are grouped to appear
as one single device to the host system while operating
independently of one another.
■
Fault-tolerant redundancy
—If one drive fails no data is lost.
(RAID 0 is an exception to this definition because RAID 0 is not
fault tolerant. See
Supported RAID Levels
.)
Supported RAID Levels
The Adaptec ATA RAID 1200A card includes a BIOS Array
Configuration Utility for boosting disk performance and data
protection. The BIOS Array Configuration Utility supports the
following RAID levels:
■
RAID 0, Striping
—Two or more drives that can read and write
data in parallel. Offers higher performance than a single drive,
but no fault tolerance. RAID 0 arrays do not store redundant
data; if any disk in the array fails, all data is lost.
ATA RAID 1200A IUG.book Page 5 Wednesday, November 13, 2002 2:22 PM
