Acer Aspire 9510 User Manual

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40English Using RAIDWhat is RAID?RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, a system in whichmultiple hard disk drives share or replicate data among the drives. Dependingon the version of RAID you choose to use, benefits include enhanced dataintegrity (backup), better throughput (speed) or increased storage (capacity),compared to single drives.Your Acer computer with two Serial ATA hard disk drives supports RAID 0, RAID1 and Intel Matrix RAID.RAID 0RAID 0 (also known as a striped set) splits data evenly across two or more diskswith no parity information for redundancy. RAID 0 is normally used to increaseperformance, although it can also be used as a way to create a small number oflarge virtual disks out of a large number of small physical ones. A RAID 0 can becreated with disks of differing sizes, but the storage space added to the array byeach disk is limited to the size of the smallest disk — for example, if a 120 GBdisk is striped together with a 100 GB disk, the size of the array will be 200 GB.RAID 0 is useful for increasing performance for systems in which there is a highamount of disk usage, such as those involved in intensive database work. It isalso a popular choice for gaming systems where performance is desired.However, since data is shared between drives without redundancy, hard drivescannot be swapped out as all disks are dependent upon each other.RAID 1RAID 1 creates an exact copy (or mirror) of a set of data on two or more disks.The array can only be as big as the smallest member disk, however. A classicRAID 1 mirrored pair contains two disks, which increases reliability by a factor oftwo over a single disk, but it is possible to have many more than two copies.Since each member can be addressed independently if the other fails, reliabilityis a linear multiple of the number of members.Intel Matrix RAIDIntel Matrix RAID utilizes two physical hard disk drives. It assigns part of eachdisk to a RAID 0 array, and the other part to a RAID 1 array, allowing users toenjoy the advantages of both RAID levels. Matrix RAID provides users with asafe area (RAID 1) for documents and other important data that must beprotected, as well as a faster area (RAID 0) for the operating system and otherapplications.