Appendix
105
400M01 Series User Manual
Using Serial ATA RAID
This motherboard adopts VIA VT8237 southbridge chipset that supports Serial
ATA (SATA) hard disks. You may install two SATA hard disks on the motherboard
for internal storage devices.
For optimal performance, please install identical drives of the same model and
capacity when creating a RAID set.
1. Introduction
RAID Basics
RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is a method of combining two
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 sys-
tem 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 implementa-
tion costs. The RAID levels which the VIA VT8237 SATA RAID Host Controller
supports are RAID 0, 1 and JBOD.
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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