ACTi INR-410 INR-420 V3.0.09 - Manual (Page 25)

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INR-410/420 System Administrator’s Manual
25
Get the Hard Disks Ready for Recording
Before the installed hard disks and eSATA storage device can start recording, they must be
initialized and recognized by Windows embedded 7 operating system. Besides regarding each
hard disk as a single volume, INR is able to combine multiple hard disks as a one single
volume of large storage size due to RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) technology,
and define how the data is stored on those hard disks regarding the protection against the
physical failure of one or more hard disks. In this chapter, you will be provided with the
knowledge of different RAID types and the instructions on RAID configurations to help you
manage your storage system.
Software RAID
Windows 7 operating system provides built-in software RAID, and the software RAID task of
Windows runs on the computer’s CPU, requiring no extra hardware attached to the computer.
In Windows, a single accessible storage file system is referred as a Volume. When you are
making the volume, you will need to select the volume type, which basically corresponds to a
certain RAID type. The supported volume types are listed below with descriptions for you so
that you will be able to choose the suitable RAID type for your video surveillance project. After
hard disks are installed correctly, use Windows Disk Management to create disk volumes, and
configure software RAID on multiple disks in the mean time.
Volume Type Introduction
Volume Type Description
Simple This volume type is the most basic method to make one disk a single logical
volume.
Spanned
(JBOD)
This type is also called JBOD (Just a Bunch of Drives), combing two or more
disks as a large single logical volume. This method does not offer any
advantage in terms of reading / writing
speeds, parity or redundancy but sacrifices
no disk space because the total storage
equals to the sum of the each individual
disk storage. However, since the data is
written to the physical disks sequentially,
any failure of a single disk is likely to fail the
whole array.