5-26 Chapter 5: Software support
5.4 RAID congurations
The motherboard comes with two RAID controllers that allow you to congure
Serial ATA hard disk drives as RAID sets.
• The Silicon Image® Sil3132 RAID controller allows you to congure RAID 1
and RAID 0 sets on the external Serial ATA hard disk drives.
• The NVIDIA® nForce™ 680i SLI Southbridge includes a high performance
SATA RAID controller that supports RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1, RAID 5 and
JBOD for six independent Serial ATA channels.

5.4.1 RAID denitions

RAID 0

(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. Use of two new identical hard disk drives
is required for this setup.
RAID 1

(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 conguration provides data protection and
increases fault tolerance to the entire system. Use two new drives or use an
existing drive and a new drive for this setup. The new drive must be of the same
size or larger than the existing drive.
RAID 0+1 is data striping and data mirroring combined without parity (redundancy
data) having to be calculated and written. With the RAID 0+1 conguration you get
all the benets of both RAID 0 and RAID 1 congurations. Use four new hard disk
drives or use an existing drive and three new drives for this setup.
RAID 5 stripes both data and parity information across three or more hard
disk drives. Among the advantages of RAID 5 conguration include better
HDD performance, fault tolerance, and higher storage capacity. The RAID
5 conguration is best suited for transaction processing, relational database
applications, enterprise resource planning, and other business systems. Use a
minimum of three identical hard disk drives for this setup.
JBOD

(Spanning)

stands for Just a Bunch of Disks and refers to hard disk drives
that are not yet congured as a RAID set. This conguration 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 other RAID performance
benets.