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Chapter 5. Intel ICH7R SATA
RAID Introduction
Intel ICH7R SATA RAID
The optional southbridge ICH7R provides a hybrid solution that com-
bines four independent SATAII ports for support of up to four Serial ATAII
(Serial ATAII RAID) drives.
Serial ATAII (SATAII) is the latest generation of the ATA interface.
SATA hard drives deliver blistering transfer speeds up to 3 Gb/sec. Serial
ATA uses long, thin cables, making it easier to connect your drive and
improving the airflow inside your PC. The most outstanding features are:
1. Supports 3 Gb/s transfers with CRC error checking.
2. Supports Hot-plug-n-play feature.
3. Data handling optimizations including tagged command queuing,
elevator seek and packet chain command.
®
Intel
ICH7R offers RAID level 0 (Striping), RAID level 1 (Mirroring
and Duplexing), RAID level 5 (Block Interleaved Distributed Parity), RAID
level 10 (A Stripe of Mirrors) and Intel
RAID 0 breaks the data into blocks which are written to separate
hard drives. Spreading the hard drive I/O load across independent chan-
nels greatly improves I/O performance. RAID 1 provides data redundancy
by mirroring data between the hard drives and provides enhanced read
performance. RAID 5 Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe
error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good
fault tolerance. Level 5 is one of the most popular implementations of RAID.
RAID 10 Not one of the original RAID levels, multiple RAID 1 mirrors are
created, and a RAID 0 stripe is created over these. Intel Matrix RAID
Technology is the advanced ability for two RAID volumes to share the
combined space of two hard drives being used in unison.
MSI Reminds You...
The minimum number of hard drives for RAID 0, RAID 1 or Matrix mode
is 2. The minimum number of hard drives for RAID 10 mode is 4. And
the minimum number of hard drives for RAID 5 mode is 3.
All the information/volumes listed in your system might differ from the
illustrations in this appendix.
Introduction to Intel ICH7R SATA RAID
Introduction
®
Martix Storage Technology.
5-1
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