User manual

SATARAID5 User’s Manual Copyright © 2004 Silicon Image Inc.
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1 Welcome
Silicon Image’s SATARAID5
TM
software enhances your data storage by combining advanced RAID
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features typically seen on
high-end data systems with low cost/high capacity Serial ATA drives. By using industry standard SATA drives and Silicon
Image Host Bus Adapters, you can achieve extraordinarily low costs while remaining assured that your data is protected
against hardware failure.
1.1 Data Enhancement
1.1.1 Data Security
SATARAID5 provides our highest commitment to data security through the use of RAID architecture to backup and protect
data. RAID levels 1, 5, and 10 provide data security as described in Section TBD below. It also supports sophisticated
sparing support such that hardware failure risk can be minimized by automatically regenerating the failed disk’s data on a
backup disk.
The software driver includes support for S.M.A.R.T.
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monitoring to predict suspect drives.
1.1.2 Data Performance
SATARAID5 can also increase storage throughput by combining the throughput of multiple drives into a single volume. RAID
levels 0, 5, and 10 support this ability. Furthermore, each volume can be tailored to provide the best performance for the data
contained on that disk.
1.1.3 Data Versatility
The driver also supports JBOD
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, Contiguous and Concatenated drives for applications which do not require increased security
or performance.
1.2 Ease of Use
The SATARAID5 Manager GUI offers an easy to use utility for creating and managing your storage. It also supports the latest
SATA enhancements including SATA-II Port Multiplier support, and up to 3Gbit/sec transfer rates on controllers that support
that speed. Creating and deleting volumes is also possible without requiring a restart of the operating system and rebuilds
never require the data to be taken off-line.
Drives can also be moved between controllers without losing the data.
1.3 Supported Operating Systems
The following operating systems are supported by the SATARAID5 driver. Check the Silicon Image website for additional
operating systems as they are supported.
• Windows XP, 32 bit
• Windows 2000, 32 bit
• Windows 2003, 32 bit
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Redundant Array of Independent Devices, a method of combining drives to provide better protection and/or
performance.
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Self Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Testing.
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Just a Bunch of Disks