Asus M2N-LR/SATA - Manual (Page 104)

ASUS M2N-LR Series -
5.4 RAID configurations
The motherboard comes with the NVIDIA ® nForce™ 570 SLI MCP (MCP55P)
RAID utility that allow you to configure Serial ATA hard disk drives as RAID sets.
The motherboard supports the following RAID configurations.
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 configuration 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 configuration include better
HDD performance, fault tolerance, and higher storage capacity. The RAID
5 configuration 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 configuration with RAID 1 segments whose segments are
RAID 1 arrays. This configuration 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 configuration can sustain multiple simultaneous drive failure. A minimum of four
hard disks is required for this setup.
If you want to boot the system from a hard disk drive included in a created RAID
set, copy first the RAID driver from the support CD to a floppy disk before you
install an operating system to the selected hard disk drive.
JBOD ( Spanning) stands for Just a Bunch of Disks and refers to hard disk drives
that are not yet configured as a RAID set. This 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 other RAID performance benefits.