Installing RAID

RAID device တစ္ခုကို Install လုပ္မယ္ဆိုရင္ ...
၁။ ပထမဆံုး Hard Disk Drive ေတြကိုတပ္ပါ။
၂။ Jumper Setting ေျပာင္းပါ။ setting ကေတာ့ Mother board စာအုပ္ထဲမွာဖတ္ၿပီးေျပာင္းလုိ႔ရပါတယ္။
၃။ Restart လုပ္ပါ။ Raid Utility ထဲ၀င္ၿပီး RAID Device တစ္ခုတည္ေဆာက္ပါ။ Utility ကို၀င္တာကေတာ့ သက္ဆိုင္တဲ့ Mother Board စာအုပ္မွာပါပါတယ္။ အမ်ားအားျဖင့္ေတာ့ F12 ကိုႏိွပ္ၿပီး၀င္ပါတယ္။
၄။ RAID device တည္ေဆာက္တဲ့အခါ name, RAID level, storage capacity တုိ႔ကို ေရြးရပါတယ္။ RAID 2 ဆိုရင္ Hard Disk ၂ခု အနည္းဆံုး၊ RAID 10 ဆိုရင္ Hard Disk ၄ခု အနည္းဆံုးရွိရပါတယ္။ HDD ေတြက အမ်ိဳးအစား (SATA, IDE) ၊ Storage capacity ေတြတူရပါတယ္။ မတူတာေတြနဲ႔ေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္မလုပ္ဘူးပါဘူး။ Reference ထဲမွာလည္းတူရမယ္လုိ႔ပါလုိ႔ပါ ... း)
၅။ Driver Disk (Floppy) လုပ္ရပါတယ္။ သတိထားဖို႔က RAID driver မွန္ဖို႔အေရးႀကီးပါတယ္။ မွားရင္ Window Installation အခါမွာ HDD ကိုမေတြ႕ဘူးလုိ႔ေျပာပါလိမ့္မယ္။
၆။ Windows XP တင္ရင္ F6 ကိုႏွိပ္ၿပီး driver ကို တင္ပါ။ ၿပီးရင္ F3 ႏိွပ္ၿပီး driver installation ကေနထြက္လုိက္ပါ။
၇။ Driver မွန္ခဲ့ရင္ Window ကို ပံုမွန္အတိုင္းၿပီးဆံုးတဲ့အထိ တင္သြားပါလိမ့္မယ္။
၈။ Window Explorer ထဲမွာ HDD တစ္ခုကိုပဲေတြ႔ရမွာပါ။ Intel Storage Matrix Software ကိုတင္ၿပီး HDD ေတြကိုၾကည့္ရင္ HDD အကုန္လံုးကိုျမင္ႏိုင္ပါတယ္။
RAID ကိုအဓိကအားျဖင့္ေတာ့ Database ေတြအတြက္ Backup လုပ္ဖို႔သံုးပါတယ္။ ASUS Mother board ေတြနဲ႔သံုးရင္ပိုၿပီး အဆင္ေျပပါတယ္။

Serial ATA (SATA)

Virtually every PC today relies on the venerable ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) interface to connect hard drives, CD drives, and other types of drives. Spurred by the relentless demands for faster drive performance and greater reliability, the ATA standard (also known as IDE), which has a rated connection speed of 3.3 MBps, has undergone many advances. The Ultra ATA (dubbed Ultra ATA/133) interface can pass 16 bits of parallel data between a drive and PC at speeds of up to 133 MBps.
Such parallel-signal schemes, however, are reaching the practical limits of current cable, drive, and controller electronics. To achieve even faster data transfer rates, drive manufacturers are turning to a serial scheme called Serial ATA (SATA). Though it may seem counterintuitive that a serial technology (which transfers data one bit at a time rather than transferring multiple data bits simultaneously, as a parallel scheme does) could outpace a parallel one, that's exactly what SATA does; it transfers data at a much faster rate and more efficiently. Now that SATA drives, add-in controller cards, and most importantly, PC chipsets are finally available, you'll want to understand the benefits of this technology.
SATA typically handles data transfers of up to 150 MBps and in the future can be scaled up to 300 MBps and beyond. Some manufacturers predict speeds as high as 600 MBps. SATA offers a speedier boot process and faster loading of programs and data. But perhaps the best part of the new technology is SATA's simpler cabling.
If you've ever looked inside a PC, you've seen the wide, gray, 40-pin ribbon cable that daisy-chains master/slave drives to the ATA controller port. Not only were those 40 wires laying close together a potential source of interference, but routing the bulky cable made the placement of drives difficult. Moreover, the traditional cables are notorious for disturbing air flow within PCs. SATA uses thin cables that route easily and don't block a PC's cooling system, thus preventing hot spots and improving overall system reliability.
Connecting SATA drives is easier, too. Each drive connects to the host PC via an individual cable; the host PC treats all drives as master devices, eliminating the jumper settings, which have frustrated users for years. This greatly eases installation and configuration. Finally, the cables can be longer. Current parallel ATA cables max out at 18 inches, while SATA cables can be as long as 39.4 inches (1 meter). That's good for high-end boxes that use full-tower cases.
You will also find adding or replacing drives easier with SATA. You won't have to power down your PC before connecting a new drive, because SATA allows for hot-pluggable connections, so you can add or remove SATA drives while your PC is running. The connectors are also keyed (that is, designed for one-way insertion), so you don't need to worry about accidentally reversing a connection.
SATA is software-compatible with ATA, so you don't need any special drivers or OS upgrades to support the new drives; the SATA controller does the conversion between the drive and host PC. Consequently, SATA drives can coexist on the same system with parallel ATA devices.
Yet because of the differences between SATA and parallel ATA, you can't simply drop a SATA drive into a parallel ATA system. Here's what it takes to implement Serial ATA on your PC.
To start, you'll need a new SATA drive such as the 120GB Seagate Barracuda ATA V (www.seagate.com). The only difference you'll see in the SATA drive is the connector scheme (and the absence of drive jumpers).
The host PC requires a SATA controller with one or more SATA ports, such as the Promise Technology SATA150 TX2plus, which combines two independent SATA ports and one Ultra ATA port and supports up to two serial and two Ultra ATA drives (www.promise.com). In new SATA-compatible machines, the motherboard uses a controller chip that supports SATA. The Marvell 88i8030 Serial ATA Bridge Chip (www.marvell.com) is one accepted device available for developers, and integrated chipsets supporting SATA are expected from leading chipset makers including ALi Corp. (www.ali.com.tw), Intel Corp. (www.intel.com), and VIA Technologies (www.via.com.tw).

RAID

What's RAID 10 And Why Should I Use It?
RAID is, of course, a Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks. It is a method of storing information on multiple hard disks for greater protection and, in some cases, performance. Under the RAID umbrella are a number of different storage methods, called levels and numbered from 0 to 9, some of which are more useful than others.
Each level is a distinct method of organizing storage, but some of them can be combined which produces a two-digit RAID level, such as RAID 10, sometimes identified (and more appropriately so) as RAID 1+0. In general, each RAID level has its own advantages and disadvantages.
RAID 10, for example, is fast, it's crashproof and it eats disk space. If you need more protection for your storage, or faster storage performance, RAID 10 is a simple, relatively cheap fix.
To implement RAID 10 you need at least two physical hard drives; just using two partitions on the same hard drive is inadequate. You also need a disk controller that understands RAID.
RAID 10 works by striping and mirroring your data across at least two disks. Mirroring, or RAID 1, means writing your data to two or more disks at the same time. Even if one disk fails completely, the mirror preserves the information. Striping, or RAID 0, means breaking your data up into chunks and writing the chunks to different disks in succession. It improves performance because the computer can get data off more than one disk simultaneously. (For the purists out there: RAID 0 technically isn't a RAID level at all because it doesn't provide any redundancy to protect information. However, it is commonly referred to as a RAID level anyway.)
Before we go on, here's one important caveat about backup and RAID 1. Although data is written to two disks simultaneously, the data is not being backed up. Should your system rather than the hard disk suffer an error, erroneous data could be sent to both disks at the same time, corrupting both drives simultaneously. You still must have a backup strategy in place, even if you use RAID 1. (For greater protection against data corruption, use a RAID level that includes a parity drive — but that's a different story.)
Put RAID 1 and RAID 0 together and you get RAID 10. RAID 10 is secure because mirroring duplicates all your data. It's fast because the data is striped across two or more disks, meaning chunks of data can be read and written to different disks simultaneously.
The drawback to RAID 10 is that it cuts your effective disk space in half. Since everything is mirrored (duplicated), two 60 GB disks give you a total system capacity of 60 GB. And remember, always use identical disks when creating a mirrored array. The disk geometry (number of heads, cylinders, etc.) is critical, and using disks that are different is discouraged in the strongest terms.
Given the cost of disks, storage space is much less of a problem than it was a few years ago. It's cheap enough to add additional disks to support your RAID 10 array and if the disk controller on your motherboard doesn't support RAID 10, you can get an add-in disk controller card for less than $50.
RAID 10 is also slightly more complex to set up than conventional storage, but it isn't particularly hard. The system or disk controller software includes install routines that will walk you through the process. It usually takes just a few minutes to install a RAID 10 array.