Asus A8V - Manual (Page 109)

ASUS A8V motherboard 5-11
5.6 RAID configurations
The motherboard comes with the VIA VT8237 controller integrated in the
SouthBridge to support Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID)
configurations. Using two Serial ATA hard disks, you can set up RAID 0,
RAID 1, and JBOD configurations. The following defines the different RAID
set configurations:
RAID 0 (called 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.
RAID 1 (called 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.
JBOD stands for Just a Bunch of Disks or also called spanning, refers to
hard disks that are not yet configured according to RAID. The JBOD
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 performance benefits of RAID.
If you use either Windows ® XP or Windows ® 2000 operating system
(OS), copy first the RAID driver from the support CD to a floppy disk
before creating RAID configurations. Refer to section “5.7 Creating a
RAID driver disk” for details.