RAID technical details 2: RAID Motherboard

In the RAID family, RAID 0 and RAID 1 are most widely used on PCs, after all, there are few individual users who are willing to use four or more hard disks to build RAID 0 + 1 or other hard disk arrays, therefore, we will only explain the two RAID methods here. We choose to support the upgrade IDE-RAID motherboard KT7A-RAID function, step by step to introduce you to the installation of IDE-RAID. The upgrading KT7A-RAID is integrated with HighPoint
370 chips, supporting RAID 0, 1, 0 + 1.
Hard Disks are indispensable for RAID. RAID 0 and RAID 1 have different requirements on disks. RAID 1 (Mirror) Disk Images generally require the same capacity of two or more hard disks, RAID 0 (Striping) disks generally do not have this requirement. Of course, it is ideal to choose hard disks with similar capacity and performance or even completely the same. To facilitate the test, we chose two 60 GB hard drive (Barracuda)
Ata iv, serial number ST360021A ). The system selects Duron MHz CPU, 2 x mb of gold cord SDRAM, and upgrades GeForce2 Pro graphics card. It should be said that it is a common configuration. We also hope to learn about the system requirements for RAID construction.
1. Create RAID 0
Step 1
First, back up the data in the hard disk. Many users do not pay attention to backup, especially some careless individual users. Creating RAID is a dangerous operation for data, and data on the entire hard disk may be destroyed without any worries. We first introduce RAID 0. This is especially true when creating RAID 0, all data on the disk in the array will be erased, including the hard disk partition table. Therefore, you must first prepare a Windows system with the Fdisk and Format commands.
98 boot disk, which is also an important thing to pay attention to in this step.
Step 2
Set the jumper of the two hard disks to the Master and connect them to the IDE3 and IDE4 ports of the upgrade KT7A-RAID, which are controlled by the HighPoint370 chip on the motherboard ). Since RAID 0 will recreate the partition tables of two hard disks, we do not need to consider the order of Hard Disk connections (we will see below that this order is important when creating RAID 1 ).
Step 3
Set the BIOS and enable the ata raid controller. We enter the integrated peripherals option in the BIOS of the upgrade KT7A-RAID board and enable the ATA100 raid ide controller. We recommend that you change the boot sequence to ATA 100 RAID. Actually, we find that this is not feasible during system installation. Can a hard disk with no partitions be started? Therefore, we still set the soft drive as the preference.
Step 4
The next step is to create a detailed introduction to the core content of RAID 0:
1. After the system BIOS settings are complete, restart the computer and no hard disk will be reported during boot detection.
2. disk management will be taken over by the HighPoint 370 chip.
3. The following are critical HighPoint 370 BIOS settings. On the HighPoint 370 disk scan page, press Ctrl and H at the same time ".
4. Go to the HighPoint 370 BIOS settings page and select "Create RAID" to Create a RAID.
5. select the RAID Mode in "Array Mode". Here we can see the options for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0 + 1, and Span, select RAID 0 here.
6. After the RAID mode is selected, the system automatically exits from the top menu and selects "Disk drivers". Generally, press enter directly.
7. The next setting is the unit size of the band. The default value is 64 KB. You can ignore this setting without special requirements.
8. next is the "Start Create (Start to Create)" option. Before you press "Y", please think about whether there is any important data on the hard disk. This is your last chance! Once RAID is created, all data on the hard disk is cleared.
9. After the BOOT disk is created, specify one.
Press Esc to exit. Of course, Press Y to confirm.
HighPoint 370 BIOS does not provide a function similar to "Exit Without Save". After modification, it is irreversible.
Step 5
After restarting the computer, we can see "Striping (RAID 0) for Array #0" on the screen. Insert a previously created boot disk to start DOS. Open the Fdisk program. Why? Why is it visible on a hard disk? The RAID array has been regarded as a hard disk. For the operating system, RAID is completely transparent, so we don't have to worry about RAID disk management. These are all done by the control chip. Next, partition by using the common single hard disk method. You will find that the "capacity" of this "hard disk is increased. Calculate carefully. Right, the total capacity is the total capacity of the two hard disks! We can
0 read/write is similar to a zipper. It separates data on two hard disks and reads data faster without wasting disk space. Do not forget to activate the primary partition After partitioning and formatting.
Step 6
The selection of the operating system makes us very cost-effective. The HighPoint370 chip provides driver support for Windows 98/NT/2000/XP. Considering that the RAID function is intended for relatively advanced users, therefore, we chose the English version of Windows XP Professional, which provides better support for new hardware (the English version is used to facilitate the subsequent winmtr testing, and you can use the Chinese version of the operating system for RAID ), windows
2000 is also a good choice, but the hardware support is obviously not as good as Windows XP Professional.
Step 7
For a computer using RAID, the operating system installation is different from that in normal cases. After Windows XP completes the first step of "file copy" and restarts, the screen appears, the installer prompts "Press F6 to install a SCSI device or RAID disk" in English. This process is very short, and users often ignore the prompts at the bottom of the screen.
Press F6 and select "S". The RAID control chip driver will be installed, and "Enter" will not be installed.
Press the "S" key to insert the RAID chip drive disk.
Press enter. The installer will automatically search for the program on the drive disk, select "WinXP", and press Enter.
If the provided version is different from the built-in driver version of Windows XP Profesional, the installer will prompt you to choose.
Press "S" to install the driver provided by the floppy disk and press "Enter" to install the driver that comes with Windows XP Professional. Press "S" and then confirm. This time, press "Enter" (this ...... Too much confirmation, huh, huh ). The next step is normal system installation, which is no different from normal installation.
Here we will introduce the installation settings of RAID 0. Next we will talk about the installation of RAID 1. Compared with RAID 0, the installation process of RAID 1 is much simpler, and the installation process is non-destructive in the case of proper operations.
2. Create RAID 1
Although the principle is completely different from RAID 0, the installation and configuration process of RAID 1 is similar to that of RAID 0. The main difference is the setting in the HighPoint 370 BIOS. To avoid repetition, we will only introduce this part of settings:
Go to HighPoint 370 BIOS and select "Create RAID" to Create:
1. Click "Array Mode" and press Enter. In RAID Mode selection, select "Mirror (RAID 1) for Data Security (create an image for the Data source disk )".
2. The next step is the selection of the source disk. We remind the user again: Be careful not to choose the wrong one.
3. Select the target disk, that is, the image disk or backup disk.
4. Start creating.
5. After the image is created, the BIOS will prompt you to create the image. This process is quite long.
6. It takes about 45 minutes to create a 60 GB image. Now RAID 1 is created.
RAID 1 copies data from the primary disk to the image disk. Therefore, you must be careful when creating RAID 1. Do not mix the primary disk with the image disk. Otherwise, the results will be tragic. RAID 1 can be created on two non-data hard disks or a hard disk with an operating system installed, it is much more convenient than RAID 0 (except for the long image production process ). After the creation is complete, we try to unplug one of the hard disks, HighPoint370
The BIOS gave a warning. Press "Esc" and the other hard disk is responsible for the source disk. All data is intact.
To add RAID 1 to a hard disk with an operating system installed, we recommend that you follow these steps: enable the control chip in the BIOS → start the operating system and install the HighPoint 370 driver → shut down and connect the source and image disks to IDE3 and 4 → go to HighPoint 370 BIOS to set RAID 1 (for the steps described above) → restart the system to complete the creation.
We conducted a simple test on the two RAID types. Although the test result of RAID 0 is confusing, it still feels much faster than a single hard disk in actual use, especially for Windows XP Professional, the startup is abnormal and the progress bar is flashing. As for the unstable transmission rate curve, we estimate there is some relationship with the Platform selection. After all, the integrated chip is very easy to interfere with such high data throughput. Even so, we can see RAID
The data transmission rate of the 0 system reaches a very high level, which is close to 60 MB/s at a time. Compared with RAID 0, although the performance of RAID 1 is not significantly improved compared with a single disk system, we found that the operating curve of RAID 1 is very stable, rarely fluctuating.
Check the disk test results in Winbench99 2.0 at a glance.
For users and operating systems, RAID 0 and 1 are transparent and do not affect any operations, just like using a hard disk.
Installing RAID with RAID card
We chose the ide raid card FastTrak66 from the FastTrak series of Promise. This product is equipped with two IDE channels of UltraDMA66, supporting RAID 1000, 1 + 0, and the domestic price is about yuan. Similar products, such as SIDEPro66 of Iwill and UltimaPlus33 of Alion, are all cost-effective products.
The first step is to insert the FastTrak66 ide raid card into the PCI slot of the motherboard. This step is easy to say. Enable the slot board on the backplane of the chassis and insert the ide raid card vertically. During the insertion process, you must pay attention to the selecting angle and uniform power to avoid damage to the Board or slot. After you confirm that the ide raid is secure, you can fix it with screws.
What readers need to do in step 2 is to connect both hard disks to the FastTrak66 Board (we recommend that you use two hard disks of the same brand and model if you plan to build RAID, in this way, you can make full use of the hard disk space and reduce the CPU usage. Once a user uses different hard disks and their respective indicators are different, CPU and other data processing will inevitably consume a lot of efficiency and time ).
For beginners, please note that do not connect the two hard disks to a hard drive online in Master/Slave Mode. You should use both of your baby hard disks as the Master to connect to the two IDE channels of FastTrak66. The principle is very simple. The IDE bus always responds to data requests from the Master device at work. In other words, when the Master device is working, the Slave device can only be in the waiting state. If so, there is no way to talk about RAID.
0 uses two hard disks in parallel to improve performance.
After the above two steps, the hardware arrangement of the ide raid card can be terminated, and the software will be set up next. Press the Power key to reboot the system. A prompt will appear when the system passes the BIOS self-check on the motherboard, press the prompt and press Ctrl + F to enter the BIOS setting interface of FastTrak66 (some brands of RAID cards have their specific access commands or methods, for example, for ibm server raid, press Ctrl + I to go to the BIOS settings page ).
On the BIOS settings page of FastTrak66, 1-6 of the hot keys correspond to the automatic configuration and check the device. the school is very busy. are you lucky to be slow? Array 1. At this time, the hard disks you can use on this machine are listed in the prompt box below. You can set the Assignment of the hard disk to Y if you want to use it. If you use RAID
If the value is 0, the RAID Mode is set to Stripe (zone with set). If the value is 1 or 1 + 0, the RAID Mode is set to Mirror or Span. Then set the data block size split in RAID 0 mode (this setting is not available for both 1 and 1 + 0 ). Finally, don't forget to press Ctrl + Y to save the settings.
OK. Now the setting of the ide raid 0 has been basically completed. The next step is to partition and format it like a common hard disk (I don't need to explain this step one by one ). Of course, if you want to enable the RAID 0 hard disk, you only need to set it in the BIOS to start from SCSI. That's right, it's SCSI Boot, because the FastTrak66 card has now mapped the hard disk with RAID 0 to a new SCSI device, so that the user cannot set it to boot from C. However, apart from the BIOS of the motherboard, other applications still treat it as a normal hard disk.
Now, install WindowsNT4 and the second Chinese version of Windows98 to test the performance. With the latest version of ZDNet's authoritative Evaluation Software WinBench2001, WINSTONE 2001, and Notron System Information in the Norton SystemWorks2001 toolbox, you can easily find that, hard Disks working in RAID 0 transmission mode can definitely win in terms of transmission rate, and the speed can basically reach twice or even higher than the normal hard disk connection rate. If someone asks you: I want my horse to run fast, and I don't want to feed my horse to eat grass, what can I do? Now, you can proudly say that RAID is the only solution to your worries.