Asus M2N-SLI - Manual (Page 128)

5-20 Chapter 5: Software support
5.4 RAID configurations
The motherboard comes with the NVIDIA ® SLI Southbridge RAID controllers 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 0+1 is
data striping and data mirroring combined without parity (redundancy
data) having to be calculated and written. With the RAID 0+1 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.
RAID 1+0 is a striped configuration with each stripe a RAID 1 array of drives. It
combines the features of both RAID 1 and RAID 0. Fault tolerance is provided
through mirroring while adding performance through striping. This offers higher
performance than a RAID 1 configuration but at a much higher cost. A minimum of
four hard disk drives is required for this setup.
JBOD
(Spanning) stands for Just a Bunch of Disks and refers to hard disk drives
that are not yet configured as a RAID set. This configuration stores the same
data redundantly on multiple disks that appear as a single disk on the operating
system. Spanning does not deliver any advantage over using separate disks
independently and does not provide fault tolerance or other RAID performance
benefits.