User's Manual

ASUS P5BV-C Series 5-1
5.1 RAID congurations
The server system/motherboard comes with Intel
®
ICH7R and Marvell
®
88SE6145
chipsets.
The Intel
®
ICH7R Soutbridge chip comes with the LSI Logic Embedded SATA RAID
(for P5BV-C / 4L only) and the Intel
®
Matrix Storage Manager. These utilities allow
you to congure the IDE and Serial ATA hard disk drives as RAID sets.
The Marvell
®
88SE6145 chip is a host bus adapter chip between PCI-Express
and Serial ATA (SATA)/Parallel ATA (PATA) devices. It employs the latest Serial
ATA (SATA) Phy technology, operating at 1.5 Gb/s or 3.0 Gb/s. The motherboard
supports the following RAID congurations:
5.1.1 RAID denitions
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 conguration 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 conguration include better
HDD performance, fault tolerance, and higher storage capacity. The RAID
5 conguration 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 a striped conguration with RAID 1 segments whose segments are
RAID 1 arrays. This conguration has the same fault tolerance as RAID 1, and
has the same overhead for fault-tolerance as mirroring alone. RAID 10 achieves
high input/output rates by striping RAID 1 segments. In some instances, a RAID
10 conguration can sustain multiple simultaneous drive failure. A minimum of four
hard disk drives is required for this setup.