Amd Bios Raid Installation Guide; Introduction To Raid - ASROCK 970 Extreme4 Installation Manual

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AMD BIOS RAID Installation Guide

AMD BIOS RAID Installation Guide is an instruction for you to configure RAID functions by using the onboard
FastBuild BIOS utility under BIOS environment. After you make a SATA3 driver diskette, press <F2> or <Del> to enter
BIOS setup to set the option to RAID mode by following the detailed instruction of the "User Manual" in our support CD
or "Quick Installation Guide", then you can start to use the onboard RAID Option ROM Utility to configure RAID.

1.1 Introduction to RAID

The term "RAID" stands for "Redundant Array of Independent Disks", which is a method combining two or more hard
disk drives into one logical unit. For optimal performance, please install identical drives of the same model and
capacity when creating a RAID set.
RAID 0 (Data Striping)
RAID 0 is called data striping that optimizes two identical hard disk drives to read and write data in parallel, interleaved
stacks. It will improve data access and storage since it will double the data transfer rate of a single disk alone while the
two hard disks perform the same work as a single drive but at a sustained data transfer rate.
WARNING!!
Although RAID 0 function can improve the access performance, it does not provide any fault tolerance. Hot-Plug any HDDs of the
RAID 0 Disk will cause data damage or data loss.
RAID 1 (Data Mirroring)
RAID 1 is called data mirroring that copies and maintains an identical image of data from one drive to a second
drive. It provides data protection and increases fault tolerance to the entire system since the disk array
management software will direct all applications to the surviving drive as it contains a complete copy of the data in
the other drive if one drive fails.
RAID 10 (Stripe Mirroring)
RAID 0 drives can be mirrored using RAID 1 techniques, resulting in a RAID 10 solution for improved performance
plus resiliency. The controller combines the performance of data striping (RAID 0) and the fault tolerance of disk
mirroring (RAID 1). Data is striped across multiple drives and duplicated on another set of drives.
RAID 0+1
RAID 0+1 is a RAID level used for both replicating and sharing data among disks. The minimum number of disks
required to implement this level of RAID is 3 (first, numbered chunks on all disks are built – like in RAID 0 – and
then every odd chunk number is mirrored with the next higher even neighbor) but it is more common to use a
minimum of 4 disks. The difference between RAID 0+1 and RAID 10 is the location of each RAID system — RAID
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