Asus M3A - Motherboard - ATX - RAID Configurations

5-26 Chapter 5: Software support
5.4 RAID congurations
The motherboard comes with the AMD
®
SB600 Southbridge RAID controller that
allows you to congure Serial ATA hard disk drives as RAID sets. The motherboard
supports the following RAID congurations.
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. (For NF-590 SLI
only)
5.4.1 Installing hard disks
The motherboard supports Serial ATA hard disk drives. For optimal performance,
install identical drives of the same model and capacity when creating a disk array.
Installing Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks
To install the SATA hard disks for a RAID conguration:
1. Install the SATA hard disks into the drive bays.
2. Connect the SATA signal cables.
3. Connect a SATA power cable to the power connector on each drive.
Refer to the RAID controllers user manual in the motherboard support CD for
detailed information on RAID congurations. See section
5.2.5 Manual menu
.
If you want to boot the system from a hard disk drive included in a RAID set,
copy rst the RAID driver from the support CD to a oppy disk before you install
an operating system to a selected hard disk drive. Refer to section
5.6 Creating
a RAID driver disk
for details.