5.5RAID configurations

The motherboard includes the Silicon Image SATARaid™ Sil3114 controller chipset and the NVIDIA® RAID controller integrated in the NorthBridge to support Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) configurations. The following defines the supported RAID set configurations:

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.

RAID 0+1 is data striping and data mirroring combined without parity (redundancy data) having to be calculated and written. The advantage of RAID 0 + 1 is fast data access (like RAID 0), but with the ability to loose one drive and have a complete duplicate surviving drive or set of drives (like RAID 1).

RAID 5 stripes both data and parity information across three or more hard disk drives. RAID 5 is seen by many as the ideal combination of good performance, good fault tolerance, and high capacity and storage capacity. It is best suited for transaction processing, relational database applications, enterprise resource planning and other business systems.

RAID 10 is implemented as a striped array whose segments are RAID 1 arrays. It has the same fault tolerance as RAID 1 and has the same overhead for fault-tolerance as mirroring alone. Its high input/output rates are achieved by striping RAID 1 segments. Under some circumstances, a RAID 10 array can sustain multiple simultaneous drive failure.

JBOD stands for Just a Bunch of Disks or also called spanning, refers to hard disks that are not yet configured according to RAID. The JBOD configuration stores the same data redundantly on multiple disks that appear as a single disk on the operating system. Spanning does not deliver any advantage over using separate disks independently and does not provide fault tolerance or performance benefits of RAID.

ASUS K8N-E Deluxe motherboard

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