ASUS E2938 User Manual

5-28

Chapter 5: Software support

If you want to boot the system from a hard disk drive included in a created RAID 

set, copy first the RAID driver from the support DVD to a floppy disk before you 

install an operating system to the selected hard disk drive. Refer to section 5.5 

Creating a RAID driver disk for details.

The motherboard comes with the  Intel

®

 ICH8R Southbridge RAID controller that 

allow you to configure IDE and Serial ATA hard disk drives as RAID sets. The 

motherboard supports the following RAID configurations.
RAID 0 (Data striping) optimizes two identical hard disk drives to read and write 

data in parallel, interleaved stacks. Two hard disks perform the same work as a 

single drive but at a sustained data transfer rate, double that of a single disk alone, 

thus improving data access and storage. Use of two new identical hard disk drives 

is required for this setup.
RAID 1 (Data mirroring) copies and maintains an identical image of data from one 

drive to a second drive. If one drive fails, the disk array management software 

directs all applications to the surviving drive as it contains a complete copy of 

the data in the other drive. This RAID configuration provides data protection and 

increases fault tolerance to the entire system. Use two new drives or use an 

existing drive and a new drive for this setup. The new drive must be of the same 

size or larger than the existing drive.
RAID 10 is data striping and data mirroring combined without parity (redundancy 

data) having to be calculated and written. With the RAID 10 configuration you get 

all the benefits of both RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations. Use four new hard disk 

drives or use an existing drive and three new drives for this setup.
RAID 5 stripes both data and parity information across three or more hard 

disk drives. Among the advantages of RAID 5 configuration include better 

HDD performance, fault tolerance, and higher storage capacity. The RAID 

5 configuration is best suited for transaction processing, relational database 

applications, enterprise resource planning,  and other business systems. Use a 

minimum of three identical hard disk drives for this setup.
Intel

 Matrix Storage. The Intel

® 

Matrix Storage technology supported by the 

ICH8R chip allows you to create a RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10 function 

to improve both system performance and data safety. You can also combine two 

RAID sets to get higher performance, capacity, or fault tolerance provided by the 

difference RAID function. For example, RAID 0 and RAID 1 set can be created by 

using only two identical hard disk drives.