About Disk Array; Disk Array Interpretation; Disk Array Member; Disk Array Types Supported By Vt8237 - SOLTEK SL-B9D-FGR Manual

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SL-B9D-FGR

5-0 About Disk Array

A "Disk Array" is formed from a group of 2 disk drives with the RAID

(Redundent Array of Independent Disks) technology. The aim of a Disk

Array is to provide better perfornance and/or data fault tolerance.

The individual disk drive in an array is called a "member". Each member

of a specific disk array is coded in their "reserved sector" with

configuration information that identifies the drive as a member. All disk

members in a formed disk array are recognized as a single physical

drive to the system.

Different types or modes of Disk Array have different formation models

and functions. The South Bridge on this mainboard supports only two

types of Disk Arrays: RAID 0 and RAID 1, but not RAID 0+1.

1. RAID 0 (or Striping mode):

RAID 0 is a group of 2 Disk Drives configured together with RAID

technology to provide better data transfer performance than a single

drive since the workload is balanced between the array members.

Reads and Writes of RAID 0 data are interleaved between multiple

drives. When any disk member fails, it affects the entire array. The

disk array size is equal to the number of drive members times the

smallest member capacity. For example, one 1GB and three 1.2GB

drives will form a 2GB (2x1GB) disk array.

2. RAID 1 (or Mirroring mode):

RAID 1 is a group of 2 Disk Drives configured together with RAID

Technology to provide the fault tolerance function. Writes duplicate

data on to RAID 1 while reads are performed in parallel. If one of the

mirrored drives suffers a mechanical failure (e.g. spindle failure) or

does not respond , the remaining drive will continue to function. This

is called Fault Tolerance.

The drive capacity of RAID 1 is half the total drive capacity of two

equal-size drive.

Chapter 5 VIA VT8237 RAID Setup

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