If one of your drives fails, just swap it out for a new one and keep working
while your RAID subsystem rebuilds the new drive in the background.
RAID comes in several varieties, but not all offer this vital redundancy. Raid 1
is the most common, safeguarding your PC by ???mirroring??? your data on your
multiple drives. Raid 0, on the other hand, spreads your data across multiple
drives to improve performance (called striping), yet offers no data redundancy.
Raid 5 works similarly to Raid 0, but adds a ???parity??? mechanism to
safeguard your data, and requires at least three drives. Finally, Raid 10 offers
true mirroring (like Raid 1) and striping (like Raid 0)??”the best of both
worlds??”but requires four drives for the full effect. Raid 1 is the easiest to
implement and is the least expensive way to get data protection from RAID.
The first ingredient you need is a SATA RAID controller, one either built in
to your motherboard, or, barring that, an add-on RAID card. Next, you need
two SATA hard disks of the same capacity, preferably the same brand and
model, too.
To get started, plug your drives into ports 0 and 1, respectively, unless your
documentation says otherwise. (Some controllers have dedicated RAID
plugs.) To make room, you may need to relegate any other SATA devices,
such as DVD drives, to higher-numbered ports. To set up the drives, enter
your PC??™s BIOS setup screen (see Appendix A), and make sure all of the
SATA ports you??™re using are enabled.
Pages:
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480