Install RAID diagram with RAID card

As we all know, CPU chip and graphics subsystem performance is soaring, but the corresponding disk subsystem performance is becoming more and more serious performance of the overall system bottlenecks. While disk technology is ata/100 today DMA66 tomorrow, none of these specifications can fundamentally improve the capabilities of the disk subsystem. It's only raid (here we refer specifically to IDE RAID technology). The so-called RAID technology, is to use more than two physical hard disk to connect, provide data redundancy fault-tolerant coordination, in order to comprehensively improve the performance of the disk subsystem. Previously, RAID technology was used primarily on high-performance workstations or servers, and was a SCSI raid structure (that is, a disk array system with two or more SCSI strings connected). With the rapid performance of IDE hard drives and falling prices, IDE RAID technology is becoming almost mature (Figure 1, 2, 3).

A piece can support RAID 0, 1, and 0+1 technology (RAID 6 level, RAID 0-5, plus a derived raid1+0. More than 2-5 of these are for high-end, while the 0,1 and 1+0 three levels support IDE RAID. The so-called RAID 0 is based on at least two hard drives, in IDE raid, it takes CPU time to divide the data stream into chunks of the same size, and then distributes it evenly to two hard drives to complete the transmission; the so-called RAID 1 is to occupy CPU part time, write to the main disk data synchronously to the mirror disk, in this mode , no matter what the main disk failure, can be recovered from the mirror, but also waste more than half of the disk space; The so-called raid 1+0 is written to two hard disk data to do two mirrors, theoretically guaranteed RAID 0 performance and RAID 1 security, the price is more than the raid 0 or 1 more than one times the number of hard drives promise FastTrak card price is about thousand yuan, plus two 30GB 7200RPM, DMA66, 2MB cache IDE hard disk, the price will not exceed 3200 yuan. And this can get 60GB of hard disk space and 25mb/s above the data transmission rate, is definitely rich players on the choice. This article will be the IDE RAID installation and use of the process with the user detailed one or two, I hope everyone's "cool" machine can try to fly up the feeling.

About the RAID card installation

Our IDE RAID card is the FastTrak66 of the Promise Company's FastTrak series (Figure 4), which is equipped with two ULTRADMA66 IDE channels (Figure 5) and supports RAID 0,1,1+0 with a domestic price of around 1000 yuan. Similar products, such as the Iwill Company's SIDEPro66, alalion company ULTIMAPLUS33, are cost-effective products.

Now the first step is to insert this FastTrak66 IDE RAID card into the PCI slot on the motherboard. This step is simple to say, open the slot bezel on the chassis backplane and insert the IDE RAID card vertically. In the process of inserting must pay attention to select the angle, the force evenly, lest damage the board card or slot. Make sure that the IDE raid is secure and you can use the screws to fix it. The second step readers need to do is to connect the two hard drives to the FASTTRAK66 board (recommended if the user intends to build raid, it is best to choose two pieces of the same brand, the same model of hard disk, so that you can make full use of hard disk space, but also relatively reduce the CPU occupancy rate. Because once users use different models of hard disks, their respective indicators are not the same, then the CPU and so on when processing data will inevitably cost a lot of efficiency and time. For starters, it's important to note that you should never connect two hard drives to a hard drive line, and you should have your two precious hard drives connected to FastTrak66 's two IDE channels as master. The simple truth is that the IDE bus is always the first to respond to a data request from a master device, in other words, when the master device is working, the slave device is only waiting, and if so, there is no way to talk about the feature of RAID 0 that uses two hard drives to improve performance.