Get the hard disks ready for recording – ACTi MNR-310 User Manual
Page 37
MNR-310 System Administrator
’s Manual
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, MNR 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 corresponds to a certain
RAID type. The supported volume types are listed below with descriptions 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.