Welcome; Sataraid5 Features - Gigabyte GA-8I955X Royal User Manual

1 Welcome

Silicon Image's SATARAID5
the industry's leading PCI-to-SATA host controller products. Two major challenges facing the storage industry today are
keeping pace with the increasing performance demands of computer systems by improving disk I/O throughput and providing
data accessibility in the face of hard disk failures while utilizing full disk capacity. With SiIicon Image Serial ATA host controller
and SATARAID5, both of these problems are solved.
SATARAID5 software provides a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for easy-to-use configurations of the RAID Groups.

1.1 SATARAID5 Features

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RAID 0 and RAID 1 Groups are supported.
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Supported OS: Win2000/XP/Server 2003.
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RAID Groups can be created and deleted without exiting Windows.
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Hot Spare and On-line Rebuilding. The spare policy supports testing periodically for a health check of the spare disk.
Spare drive can be global or dedicated to a specific RAID group.
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Supports Auto and Manual rebuild policy for a RAID group.
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System GUI Monitoring Utility:
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Displays/Logs/Alerts Users to Vital RAID Group Information.
• Manages RAID Group Functions (configures, rebuilds, etc.,).
• Supports the ability to partition and map a segment of disk to a virtual LUN or disk.
• Supports up to two RAID groups. Any excess capacity on disk drives can be formatted as independent logical drives.
• Adjustable Stripe Size for RAID 0.
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Uses the Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) feature in the attached drives for automatic
notification of imminent drive failures.
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Employ RAID recovery algorithms to maintain data integrity in the event of a disk failure including bad block management.
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Automatically Selects Highest Available Transfer Speed for All SATA Devices. Supports the following:
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Data transfer rate up to 150MB/Sec (SiI3114, SiI3124-1), and 300MB/Sec (SiI3124-2, Sil3132)
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Support up to 4 SATA devices connected to a single controller.
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ACPI, SATA 1.0 (SiI3114, Sii3124-1), and SATA 2.0 (SiI3124-2, Sil3132)
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Supports drive roaming capability allowing drives from one controller to be moved to another without loss of data.
• Employs a task manager for the scheduling of any RAID or disk management operations including RAID group creation,
rebuild, and test.
4
TM
software provides Serial ATA RAID 0 (Striping) and RAID 1 (Mirroring) functionality to enhance
SATARAID5 User's Manual