MSI Z97 XPOWER AC - Manual (Page 106)

Appendix B
B-2 Intel RAID
Introduction
The motherboard comes with the Intel RAID controller that allows you to configure
SATA hard drives as RAID sets.
SATA hard drives deliver blistering transfer speeds up to 6 Gb/s. Serial ATA uses
long, thin cables, making it easier to connect your drive and improving the airflow
inside your PC. The most outstanding features are:
1. Supports 3 Gb/s or 6 Gb/s transfers with CRC error checking.
2. Supports Hot-plug-n-play feature.
3. Data handling optimizations including tagged command queuing, elevator seek
and packet chain command.
Intel ® RAID controller offers RAID level 0 (Striping), RAID level 1 (Mirroring and
Duplexing), RAID level 5 (Block Interleaved Distributed Parity), RAID level 10 (A Stripe
of Mirrors) , Intel ® Rapid Storage Technology.
RAID 0 breaks the data into blocks which are written to separate hard drives.
Spreading the hard drive I/O load across independent channels greatly improves I/O
performance.
RAID 1 provides data redundancy by mirroring data between the hard drives and
provides enhanced read performance.
RAID 5 Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction
information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. Level 5 is
one of the most popular implementations of RAID.
RAID 10 Not one of the original RAID levels, multiple RAID 1 mirrors are created, and
a RAID 0 stripe is created over these.
Intel ® Rapid Storage Technology is the advanced ability for two RAID volumes to share
the combined space of two hard drives being used in unison.
Intel ® Rapid Storage Technology utilizes RAID 1 functionality to copy data from a
designated Master drive to a designated Recovery drive. The size of the Master drive
must be less than or equal to the size of the Recovery drive. When a Recovery volume
is created, complete capacity of the Master drive will be used as the Master volume.
Only one Recovery Volume can exist on a system. There are 2 methods of updating
the data on the Master to the Recovery drive. They are Continuous Update Policy and
On Request Update Policy.
Important
The least number of hard drives for RAID 0, RAID 1, Recovery or Matrix mode is 2.
The least number of hard drives for RAID 10 mode is 4. And the least number of hard
drives for RAID 5 mode is 3.
All the information/ volumes/ pictures listed in your system might differ from the
illustrations in this appendix.