Foxconn VT8237R Plus User Manual - Page 3

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Using Serial ATA RAID

This motherboard adopts VIA VT8237R Plus southbridge chipset that supports

Serial ATA (SATA) hard disks. You may install two SATA hard disks on the

motherboard for storage devices.

For optimal performance, please install identical drives of the same model and

capacity when creating a RAID set.

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 VT8237R Plus SATA RAID Host Con-

troller 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.