ASUS P5N64 WS Manual De Usuario

5-40

Chapter 5: Software support

The motherboard comes with three RAID controllers that allow you to configure 

SATA / SAS hard disk drives as RAID sets.
•  The NVIDIA

 790i Ultra SLI™ SATA RAID includes a high 

performance SATA RAID controller that supports RAID 0, 1, 10, and 5 for six 

independent Serial ATA channels.

• 

 88SE6121 eSATA RAID. Enabled by Marvell

® 

88SE6121 controller, 

the Marvell

® 

RAID supports RAID 0, 1, 10 and 5 sets and extends the 

advantages of software RAID beyond internal hard disk drives to external hard 

disk drives or port-multiplier devices.

• 

 88SE6320 SAS RAID. Enabled by Marvell

® 

88SE6320 controller, the 

Marvell

® 

 SAS RAID supports RAID 0 and 1 for two independent SAS channels.

 (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 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.
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.

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 

Creating a RAID driver disk for details.