What is create raid disk drive. Setting up a Raid array and installing the latest versions of Windows operating systems on it
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RAID array. What is it? What for? And how to create?
Over the long decades of the development of the computer industry, information storage media for computers have gone through a serious evolutionary path of development. Punched tapes and punched cards, magnetic tapes and drums, magnetic, optical and magneto-optical disks, semiconductor drives - this is just a short list of already tested technologies. At present, attempts are being made in the laboratories of the world to create holographic and quantum storage devices that will make it possible to increase the recording density and the reliability of its storage many times over.
In the meantime, hard drives have long been the most common means of storing information in a personal computer. Otherwise, they can be called hard disk drives (hard disk drives), hard drives, hard disks, but the essence of the name change does not change - these are drives with a package of magnetic disks in a single case.
The first hard drive, called the IBM 350, was assembled on January 10, 1955 in the laboratory of the American company IBM. With the size of a good cabinet and weight of a ton, this hard drive could hold five megabytes of information. From a modern point of view, such a volume cannot even be called ridiculous, but during the mass use of punched cards and magnetic tapes with sequential access, this was a colossal technological breakthrough.
Unloading the first IBM 350 hard drive from an airplane
Less than six decades have passed since that day, but now you will not surprise anyone with a hard drive weighing less than two hundred grams, ten centimeters long and with a volume of information of a couple of terabytes. At the same time, in principle, the technology for writing, storing and reading data is no different from that used in the IBM 350 - the same magnetic plates and read/write heads sliding over them.
The evolution of hard drives against the background of an inch ruler (photo from " Wikipedia " )
Unfortunately, it is the peculiarities of this technology that are the cause of two main problems that are associated with the use of hard drives. The first of these is the too low speed of writing, reading and transferring information from the disk to the processor. In a modern computer, it is the hard drive that is the slowest device, often determining the performance of the entire system as a whole.
The second problem is the insufficient security of the information stored on the hard disk. If the hard drive breaks down, you can irretrievably lose all the data that was stored on it. And it’s good if the losses are limited to the loss of a family photo album (although this is actually not good enough). The destruction of important financial and marketing information can be the cause of the collapse of the business.
In part, it helps to protect the stored information by regularly backing up (backing up) all or only important data on the hard drive. But even in this case, if it breaks, that part of the data that has been updated since the last backup will be lost.
Luckily, there are methods that help overcome the above disadvantages of traditional hard drives. One of these methods is the creation of RAID - arrays of several hard drives.
What is RAID
On the Internet and even in modern computer literature, you can often find the term "RAID array", which is actually a tautology, since the abbreviation RAID (redundant array of independent disks) already stands for "redundant array of independent disks".
The name fully reveals the physical meaning of such arrays - it is a set of two or more hard drives. The joint work of these disks is controlled by a special controller. As a result of the controller operation, such arrays are perceived by the operating system as one hard drive, and the user may not think about the nuances of controlling the operation of each hard drive separately.
There are several main types of RAID, each of which has a different effect on the overall reliability and speed of the array compared to single drives. They are designated by a conditional number from 0 to 6. A similar designation with a detailed description of the architecture and principle of operation of arrays was proposed by specialists from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to the main seven types of RAID, various combinations of them are also possible. Let's consider them further.
This is the simplest type of hard drive array, the main purpose of which is to increase the performance of the computer's disk subsystem. This is achieved by dividing the streams of written (read) information into several substreams, which are simultaneously written (read) to several hard drives. As a result, the total speed of information exchange, for example, for two-disk arrays increases by 30-50% compared to one hard drive of the same type.
The total volume of RAID 0 is equal to the sum of the volumes of hard drives included in it. The information is divided into data blocks of a fixed length, regardless of the length of the recorded files.
The main advantage of RAID 0 is a significant increase in the speed of information exchange between the disk system without losing the useful volume of hard drives. The disadvantage is a decrease in the overall reliability of the storage system. If any of the RAID 0 disks fails, all information recorded in the array is irretrievably lost.
Similar to the one discussed above, this array type is also the easiest to organize. It is built on the basis of two hard drives, each of which is an exact (mirror) reflection of the other. Information is written to both disks in the array in parallel. Data is read simultaneously from both disks in sequential blocks (parallelization of requests), due to which a slight increase in read speed is achieved compared to a single hard disk.
The total volume of RAID 1 is equal to the volume of the smaller hard drive in the array.
Advantages of RAID 1: high reliability of information storage (data is intact as long as at least one of the disks included in the array is intact) and some increase in read speed. Disadvantage - buying two hard drives, you get the usable volume of only one. Despite the loss of half of the useful volume, "mirror" arrays are quite popular due to their high reliability and relatively low cost - a pair of disks is still cheaper than four or eight.
When building these arrays, an information recovery algorithm is used using Hamming codes (an American engineer who developed this algorithm in 1950 to correct errors in the operation of electromechanical computers). To ensure the operation of this RAID controller, two groups of disks are created - one for storing data, the second group for storing error correction codes.
This type of RAID is not very common in home systems due to the excessive redundancy of the number of hard drives - for example, in an array of seven hard drives, only four will be allocated for data. With an increase in the number of disks, redundancy decreases, which is reflected in the table below.
The main advantage of RAID 2 is the ability to correct emerging errors "on the fly" without reducing the speed of data exchange between the disk array and the central processor.
RAID 3 and RAID 4
These two types of disk arrays are very similar in their construction scheme. Both use several hard drives to store information, one of which is used solely for the placement of checksums. Three hard drives are enough to create RAID 3 and RAID 4. Unlike RAID 2, data recovery "on the fly" is impossible - information is restored after replacing a failed hard drive for some time.
The difference between RAID 3 and RAID 4 is the level of data partitioning. In RAID 3, information is split into separate bytes, which leads to a serious slowdown when writing / reading a large number of small files. In RAID 4, data is divided into separate blocks, the size of which does not exceed the size of one sector on the disk. As a result, the processing speed of small files is increased, which is critical for personal computers. For this reason, RAID 4 has become more widespread.
A significant disadvantage of the arrays under consideration is the increased load on the hard disk intended for storing checksums, which significantly reduces its resource.
Disk arrays of this type are actually a development of the RAID 3/RAID 4 scheme. A distinctive feature is that a separate disk is not used to store checksums - they are evenly distributed across all hard disks of the array. The distribution resulted in the possibility of parallel writing to several disks at once, which somewhat increases the speed of data exchange compared to RAID 3 or RAID 4. However, this increase is not so significant, since additional system resources are spent on calculating checksums using the XOR operation. At the same time, the reading speed increases significantly, since a simple parallelization of the process is possible.
The minimum number of hard drives to build RAID 5 is three.
Arrays built according to the RAID 5 scheme have a very significant drawback. If any disk fails after its replacement, it takes several hours to fully restore the information. During this time, the array's undamaged hard drives operate in an ultra-intensive mode, which significantly increases the likelihood of a second drive failure and complete loss of information. Although rare, this does happen. In addition, during RAID 5 reconciliation, the array is almost completely occupied by this process and the current write / read operations are performed with large delays. If for the majority of ordinary users this is not critical, then in the corporate sector such delays can lead to certain financial losses.
To a large extent, the above problem is solved by building arrays according to the RAID 6 scheme. In these structures, the storage of checksums, which are also cyclically and evenly distributed to different disks, is allocated an amount of memory equal to the volume of two hard disks. Instead of one, two checksums are calculated, which guarantees data integrity in case of simultaneous failure of two hard drives in the array at once.
The advantages of RAID 6 are a high degree of information security and less performance loss than in RAID 5 during data recovery when replacing a damaged disk.
The disadvantage of RAID 6 is a decrease in the overall data exchange rate by about 10% due to an increase in the volume of necessary checksum calculations, as well as due to an increase in the amount of information being written / read.
Combined RAID types
In addition to the main types discussed above, various combinations of them are widely used, which compensate for certain shortcomings of simple RAID. In particular, the use of RAID 10 and RAID 0+1 schemes is widespread. In the first case, a pair of mirror arrays are combined into RAID 0, in the second case, two RAID 0 arrays are combined into a mirror. In both cases, the increased performance of RAID 0 is added to the security of RAID 1 information.
Often, in order to increase the level of protection of important information, RAID 51 or RAID 61 construction schemes are used - mirroring of already highly protected arrays ensures exceptional data safety in case of any failures. However, it is impractical to implement such arrays at home due to excessive redundancy.
Building an array of disks - from theory to practice
A specialized RAID controller is responsible for building and managing the operation of any RAID. Much to the relief of the average PC user, in most modern motherboards these controllers are already implemented at the chipset southbridge level. So, to build an array of hard drives, it is enough to take care of acquiring the required number of them and determining the desired RAID type in the corresponding section of the BIOS setup. After that, in the system, instead of several hard drives, you will see only one, which can be divided into sections and logical drives if desired. Please note that if you are still using Windows XP, you will need to install an additional driver.
External RAID controller with four SATA ports
Note that integrated controllers are usually capable of creating RAID 0, RAID 1, and combinations thereof. To create more complex arrays, you still need to purchase a separate controller.
And finally, one more piece of advice - to create a RAID, purchase hard drives of the same size, the same manufacturer, the same model, and preferably from the same batch. Then they will be equipped with the same sets of logic and the operation of the array of these hard drives will be the most stable.
Today we will learn interesting information about what a RAID array is and what role these arrays play in the life of hard drives, yes, yes, in them.
The hard drives themselves play a rather important role in the computer, since, with the help of them, we start the system and store a lot of information on them.
Time passes and any hard drive can fail, it can be any that we are not talking about today.
I hope that many have heard of the so-called raid arrays, which allow not only to speed up the work of hard drives, but also, in which case, save important data from disappearing, perhaps forever.
Also, these arrays have ordinal numbers, which is how they differ. Each performs a different function. For example, there is RAID 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. These are the same arrays we will talk about today, and then I will write an article on how to use some of them.
What is a RAID array?
RAID- this is a technology that allows you to combine several devices, namely, hard drives, in our case there is something like a bunch of them. Thus, we increase the reliability of data storage and read / write speed. Perhaps one of these functions.
So, if you want to either speed up your disk or just secure your information, it's up to you. More precisely, it depends on the choice of the desired Raid configuration, these configurations are marked with serial numbers 1, 2, 3 ...
Raids are a very useful feature and I recommend it to everyone. For example, if you use 0th configuration, then you will experience an increase in the speed of the hard drive, after all, the hard drive is almost the lowest speed device.
If you ask why, then here, I think, everything is clear. every year they become more powerful, they are equipped with a higher frequency, a larger number of cores, and much more. The same with and . And hard drives are growing so far only in volume, and the turnover rate has remained the same as it was 7200. Of course, there are also rarer models. So far, the situation is being saved by the so-called, which speed up the system several times.
Let's say you went to build RAID 1, in this case you will receive a high guarantee of protecting your data, since they will be duplicated on another device (disk) and, if one hard drive fails, all information will remain on the other.
As you can see from the examples, raids are very important and useful, they should be used.
So, a RAID array is physically a bundle of two hard drives connected to the motherboard, you can have three or four. By the way, it should also support the creation of RAID arrays. Connecting hard drives is carried out according to the standard, and the creation of raids takes place at the software level.
When we created the raid programmatically, nothing much changed by eye, you just work in the BIOS, and everything else will remain as it was, that is, looking into My Computer, you will see all the same connected drives.
It doesn't take much to create an array: a motherboard with RAID support, two identical hard drives ( it is important). They should be the same not only in volume, but also in terms of cache, interface, etc. It is desirable that the manufacturer be the same. Now we turn on the computer and, there we look for the parameter SATA Configuration and put on RAID. After restarting the computer, a window should appear in which we will see information about disks and raids. There we must press CTRL+I to start setting up the raid, that is, adding or removing disks from it. Then the setup will begin.
How many of these raids are there? There are several of them, namely RAID 1, RAID 2, RAID 3, RAID 4, RAID 5, RAID 6. In more detail, I will talk about only two of them.
- RAID 0- allows you to create a disk array in order to increase the speed of reading / writing.
- RAID 1– allows you to create mirrored disk arrays for data protection.
RAID 0, what is it?
array RAID 0, which is also called stripping uses 2 to 4 hard drives, rarely more. Working together, they increase productivity. Thus, the data with such an array is divided into data blocks, and then written to several disks at once.
Performance increases due to the fact that one block of data is written to one disk, to another disk, another block, etc. I think it is clear that 4 disks will increase performance more than two. If we talk about security, then it suffers on the entire array. If one of the disks fails, then in most cases, all information will be lost forever.
The fact is that in a RAID 0 array, information is located on all disks, that is, the bytes of a file are located on several disks. Therefore, if one disk fails, a certain amount of data will also be lost, and recovery is impossible.
From this it follows that it is necessary to make permanent on external media.
RAID 1, what is it?
array RAID 1, it is also called Mirroring- mirror. If we talk about the disadvantage, then in RAID 1 the volume of one of the hard drives is somehow "inaccessible" to you, because it is used to duplicate the first drive. In RAID 0 this space is available.
The benefits, as you might have guessed, are that the array provides high data reliability, meaning that if one drive fails, all the data remains on the other. Failure of two disks at once is unlikely. Such an array is often used on servers, but this does not prevent it from being used on ordinary computers.
If you choose RAID 1, then be aware that performance will drop, but if data is important to you, then use this approach.
RAID 2-6, what is it?
Now I will briefly describe the remaining arrays, so to speak, for general development, and all because they are not as popular as the first two.
RAID 2- needed for arrays that use the Hamming code (I was not interested in what kind of code). The principle of operation is approximately the same as in RAID 0, that is, information is also divided into blocks and written one by one to disks. The remaining disks are used to store error correction codes, with the help of which, in the event of a failure of one of the disks, data can be restored.
True, for this array it is better to use 4 disks, which is quite expensive, and as it turned out, when using so many disks, the performance gain is rather controversial.
RAID 3, 4, 5, 6- I will not write about these arrays here, since the necessary information is already on Wikipedia, if you want to learn about these arrays, then read.
Which RAID array to choose?
Let's say that you often install various programs, games and copy a lot of music or movies, then you are recommended to use RAID 0. When choosing hard drives, be careful, they must be very reliable so as not to lose information. Be sure to back up your data.
Have important information that needs to be safe and sound? Then RAID 1 comes to the rescue. When choosing hard drives, their characteristics should also be identical.
Conclusion
So we sorted out for someone new, and for someone old information on RAID arrays. I hope that the information will be useful for you. Soon I will write about how to create these arrays.
At the end of last week I bought components for a computer and ran into a number of problems when setting up the equipment. The new computer is designed to store databases in the office of one company, so a RAID array was needed. The budget was about 20,000 rubles, so I collected it on the AMD platform. ASUS M4A88TD-M motherboard and two identical WD 500 Gb hard drives. To set up a RAID array, I connected the HDD to the SATA0 and SATA1 connectors. Created a RAID 1 array, combining hard drives with increased reliability and fault tolerance. When hard drives mirror each other. The recommendations described below are suitable for setting up RAID0, increasing the speed of disks.
First, I went into the BIOS. For my motherboard, pressing the DEL button at boot, for motherboards from other companies, it may be F2. In configuration settings, SATA switched IDE mode to RAID. Pressed F10 to save the settings and restarted the computer.
Second, you need to enable the RAID array. This is the first moment at which I fell into a stupor. The instructions for the ASUS motherboard do not say a word about this. While the computer was booting, I pressed Ctrl+F. Opened the Option ROM Utility menu. Here I selected the second item by pressing 2.
In this menu, press Ctrl+C to create a RAID. Going through the points, I turned on the RAID Mode functions in the RAID1 position, opposite the Y disks. Then I pressed Ctrl + Y twice, entered the name of the RAID array and saved the settings. Exited and restarted the computer.
Now when you boot your computer, you can see that a RAID1 array is connected to the system.
Third, I determined the priority of the download queue from different devices. To do this, I had to enter the BIOS again. The DVD drive, followed by my RAID, and the last connected device, i.e. flash drives.
I installed Windows 7 on a RAID array. In principle, the following tips are suitable for installing Windows XP, Vista, Server 2008 and Windows 8 on a RAID array. Before starting the installation, I went to the ASUS website from another computer and downloaded the AMD RAID driver. The RAID driver is loaded on a flash disk, it does not need to be inserted into the USB connector before selecting hard disk partitions. The Windows image was on DVD. After that, I moved on to installing the OS.
Fourth, I used the driver from the flash drive when I got to the partition selection. I inserted the flash drive, clicked Download and Browse.
In the pop-up menu, I selected the driver directory, operating system and bit depth. In my case Windows 7 64bit.
The Windows Installer has detected the AMD AHCI Compatible RAID Controller driver. It was enough to see the hard drive partition. Removed the flash drive from the USB port.
Here the second snag awaited me when Windows 7 was not installed. I chose the standard Create method, the installer defined the entire volume of the disk as Primary. Clicked Next and got an error. The installer was unable to create a new or find an existing system partition. Additional information and so on. When Windows won't install because of a partition, the solution is to do your own partitioning of the disk. Deleted all sections. Pressed Shift+F10.
Fifth, pressing Shift+F10 brought up the command line. Shift+Alt returns the English keyboard layout on the Russian distribution. Entered diskpart, the command to call the disk utility. The next command is list disk. I saw two disks in the system: disk 0 is a flash drive, disk 1 is a RAID array. I selected disk 1 with the select disk 1 command. Then I entered create partition primary size = 131072, created a 128 GB system partition. The create partition primary command is responsible for this. size command to determine the size of a disk.
I defined the second part of the disk as a partition with the create partition extended command. Didn't use size to include all the remaining space on the second drive. Which in the future will allow you to create a logical disk.
I selected the first partition with the select partition 1 command. And with the active command, the partition is marked as active. After that I closed the command line window. Clicked the Update button.
After updating the list of partitions, I saw two disks with a capacity of 128 GB and 337 GB. Select the first section and click Next.
The hotly anticipated inscription Installing Windows… Installing Windows proceeded normally.
I did it several times in three evenings. Some attempts were with errors, which increased the time. If you have any questions, write in the comments. For example, you need to restart the computer after partitioning the disk into new partitions if the flash drive was inserted before Windows was installed. All of the above was repeated at a time to make sure the five-point algorithm was correct. Installing Windows 7 on RAID works, verified!
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The amount of information is growing rapidly. Thus, according to the analytical organization IDC, in 2006, about 161 billion GB of information, or 161 exabytes, were generated on Earth. If we represent this amount of information in the form of books, then we get 12 ordinary bookshelves, only their length will be equal to the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Many users are thinking about purchasing more and more capacious drives, since their prices are falling, and for $100 you can now buy a modern 320 GB hard drive. Most modern motherboards have an integrated RAID controller on board with the ability to organize arrays of levels 0 and 1. So you can always buy a couple of SATA drives and combine them into a RAID array. This material just discusses the process of creating RAID arrays of levels 0 and 1, comparing their performance. Two modern Seagate Barracuda ES (Enterprise Storage) hard drives with a maximum capacity of 750 GB were taken as tested. A few words about the technology itself. The Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks (RAID) was designed to improve the fault tolerance and efficiency of computer storage systems. RAID technology was developed at the University of California in 1987. It was based on the principle of using several small disks, interacting with each other through special software and hardware, as a single high-capacity disk. The original design of RAID arrays was to simply connect storage areas of multiple individual drives. However, later it turned out that such a scheme reduces the reliability of the matrix and practically does not affect the performance. For example, four drives in a matrix will fail four times more often than one such drive. To solve this problem, engineers at the Berkeley Institute have proposed six different levels of RAID. Each of them is characterized by a certain fault tolerance, hard drive capacity and performance. In July 1992, the RAID Advisory Board (RAB) was formed to standardize, classify, and study RAID. Currently, RAB has defined seven standard RAID levels. A redundant array of independent disk drives is typically implemented using a RAID controller board. In our case, the hard drives were connected to the integrated RAID controller of the abit AN8-Ultra motherboard based on the nForce 4 Ultra chipset. First, let's look at the possibilities offered by the chipset for building RAID arrays. nForce 4 Ultra allows you to create RAID arrays of levels 0, 1, 0+1, JBOD.
RAID 0 (Stripe)
Disk striping, also known as RAID 0, reduces disk read and write access for many applications. Data is divided among multiple disks in the array so that reads and writes are performed simultaneously on multiple disks. This level provides high read/write speed (theoretically, doubling), but low reliability. For a home user, this is probably the most interesting option, which allows you to achieve a significant increase in the speed of reading and writing data from drives.
RAID 1 (Mirror)
Disk mirroring, known as RAID 1, is designed for those who want to easily back up their most important data. Each write operation is performed twice, in parallel. A mirrored, or duplicated, copy of the data can be stored on the same drive or on a second spare drive in the array. RAID 1 provides data backup if the current volume or drive becomes corrupted or becomes unavailable due to a hardware failure. Disk mirroring can be used for high availability systems or for automatic backup of data instead of the tedious manual process of duplicating information to more expensive and less reliable media.
RAID 0 systems can be duplicated with RAID 1. Disk striping and mirroring (RAID 0+1) provides better performance and protection. The optimal method in terms of reliability / performance, however, requires a large number of drives.
JBOD
JBOD - this abbreviation stands for "Just a Bunch of Disks", that is, just a group of disks. This technology allows you to combine disks of different capacities into an array, however, in this case, there is no increase in speed, rather, on the contrary. The NVIDIA RAID integrated RAID controller we are reviewing has other interesting features: Identification of a failed disk. Many users of multi-disk systems buy multiple identical hard drives to take full advantage of the disk array. If the array fails, the only way to identify the failed drive is by the serial number, limiting the user's ability to correctly identify the failed drive.
The NVIDIA Disk Warning System simplifies identification by displaying the motherboard with the broken port on the screen, so you know exactly which drive needs to be replaced. Installing a backup disk. Disk mirroring technologies allow users to designate spare disks that can be configured as hot spares, protecting the disk array in the event of a failure. A shared spare can protect multiple disk arrays, and a dedicated spare can serve as a hot spare for a specific disk array. Spare disk support, which provides additional protection on top of mirroring, has traditionally been limited to high-end multi-disk systems. NVIDIA storage technology brings this capability to the PC. A dedicated spare drive can replace a failed drive until the repair is complete, allowing the support team to choose any convenient time to repair. morphing. In a traditional multi-disk environment, users who want to change the state of a disk or a multi-disk array must back up data, delete the array, reboot the PC, and then configure the new array. During this process, the user must go through quite a few steps just to configure the new array. NVIDIA storage technology allows you to change the current state of a disk or array with a single action called morphing. Morphing allows users to upgrade a drive or array to improve performance, reliability, and capacity. But more importantly, you do not need to perform numerous actions. Cross RAID controller. Unlike competitive multi-disk (RAID) technologies, the NVIDIA solution supports both Serial ATA (SATA) and parallel ATA drives within a single RAID array. Users do not need to know the semantics of each hard drive, as the differences in their settings are obvious. NVIDIA storage technology fully supports the use of a multi-disk array to boot the operating system when the computer is turned on. This means that all available hard drives can be included in the array for maximum performance and protection of all data. Data recovery "on the fly". In the event of a disk failure, disk mirroring allows you to continue working without interruption thanks to a duplicate copy of the data stored in the array. NVIDIA storage technology goes one step further and allows the user to create a new mirror copy of data while the system is running, without interrupting user and application access to the data. On-the-fly data recovery eliminates system downtime and increases the protection of critical information. Hot connection. NVIDIA storage technology supports hot plugging for SATA drives. In the event of a drive failure, the user can disconnect the failed drive without shutting down the system and replace it with a new one. NVIDIA user interface. With an intuitive interface, anyone with no experience with RAID can easily use and manage NVIDIA storage technology (also known as NVIDIA RAID). A simple mouse interface allows you to quickly define disks to configure in an array, activate striping, and create mirrored volumes. The configuration can be easily changed at any time using the same interface.
As promised, today I will write an article on how to make a RAID array of two disks. For those who haven't read about it, read the link. So, these arrays are able to solve the most important problems in the system. An example is that with the help of arrays we can protect important data in case of failure of one of the hard drives and increase the speed of the system. In a previous article on RAID arrays, I said that this technology is mainly used on servers in various companies, but nothing prevents us from using it on home computers, especially since it doesn’t need much (a motherboard that supports arrays and two identical disks).
So, let's start creating RAID arrays. I must say right away that you need to transfer all the most important data to another medium, because, during the creation process, the disks will be cleared.
How to create a RAID array using the built-in controller?
If your motherboard supports the creation of raids, then read this manual. We will work on the basis of an ASUS board with support, but the principle of creation is almost the same everywhere. Go.
First we need to, on ASUS motherboards, they usually press the key DEL. Now you need to go to the section where the parameters for the SATA controller are located.
Usually, the position is switched to ACHI, but you must move it to position RAID. As I said in the previous article, your disks must be completely identical, in absolutely ALL respects. Now, as usual, save the settings and restart the computer.
During the reboot of the computer, that is, before the system is loaded, you need to press the combination CTRL-I or CTRL-F, sometimes this is not required.
In our experiment with the ASUS board, we see the following window with the following parameters:
- View Drive Assignments- the parameter allows you to see the disks that we can use in creating a RAID array.
- LD View / LD Define Menu– this parameter shows already created arrays.
- Delete LD Menu- I think it's clear. Deleting created arrays.
- Controller Configuration n - various settings.
In our case, we select item 2. Press the 2 key on the keyboard and get into the next window.
Here, as already mentioned, there are already created RAIDs. To view the settings, just press the key Enter. Combinations ctrl+v allows you to see disks that are outside the arrays. Using the keys ctrl+c we can create new arrays. We need to create an array, so we click ctrl+c.
In the next window, we will see a menu in which raids will be created, it is located at the top. Disks that are not yet used as raids are at the bottom. We can switch the parameters with a space, and the points of these parameters with the arrows on the keyboard.
Reminder! If you don't remember then RAID 1 we are responsible for duplicating disks, that is, if one fails, then all the information will remain on the second. This creates data security. RAID 0 is responsible for increasing system performance, because, disks work simultaneously, which creates maximum read and write speeds.
In the screenshot, which is just above, the parameters for creating RAID 1, but there was nothing special to set there, since the parameters were mostly set by default, only the type of raid and disks were selected.
Once all the necessary parameters are set, press the keys ctrl+y.
Then, you can press any key, then the name of the raid will be set by default, or press Ctrl + Y again and enter your own name. The second option looks like this:
After that, a warning will appear stating that all data from the disks will be destroyed. If you are sure that you have saved all the necessary data, then click again CTRL+Y.
Next, a window will appear where you will need to select the size for the array, or it will take up all the space on the disks. You can select the entire space, there will be nothing wrong with that. To do this, press any key.
That's all, we have created a RAID array, now we reboot the computer.
Now we need to carry out the allocation of space on the raid and initialization. You can do this in the Disk Management Wizard, which is located along the path: Control Panel — Administration — Computer management — Disk Management.
You still need to create partitions and allocate space, but here I think you will not have problems. Just right-click on an unallocated partition and select "Create Simple Volume".
Actually, although the article turned out to be voluminous, I painted it quite briefly. Therefore, ask questions in the comments if something is not clear. I will write more articles about RAID arrays, so stay tuned for site updates.