RAID on Airtop

From fit-PC wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

The Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel RST®) offers several diverse options for RAID (redundant array of independent disks) to meet the needs of the end user. AHCI support provides higher performance and alleviates disk bottlenecks by taking advantage of the independent DMA engines that each SATA port offers in the PCH.

  • RAID Level 0 performance scaling up to 6 drives, enabling higher throughput for data intensive applications such as video editing.
  • RAID Level 1 offers data security, by mirroring.
  • RAID Level 5 provides highly efficient storage while maintaining fault-tolerance on 3 or more drives. By striping parity, and rotating it across all disks, fault tolerance of any single drive is achieved while only consuming 1 drive worth of capacity. That is, a 3 drive RAID 5 has the capacity of 2 drives, or a 4 drive RAID 5 has the capacity of 3 drives. RAID 5 has high read transaction rates, with a medium write rate. RAID 5 is well suited for applications that require high amounts of storage while maintaining fault tolerance.
  • RAID Level 10 provides high levels of storage performance with data protection, combining the fault-tolerance of RAID Level 1 with the performance of RAID Level 0. By striping RAID Level 1 segments, high I/O rates can be achieved on systems that require both performance and fault-tolerance. RAID Level 10 requires 4 hard drives, and provides the capacity of two drives.


By using the PCH’s built-in Intel Rapid Storage Technology, there is no loss of PCI resources (request/grant pair) or add-in card slot.

Intel Rapid Storage Technology (Intel RST) functionality requires the following items:

  1. Intel Rapid Storage Technology RAID Option ROM must be on the platform
  2. Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers, most recent revision
  3. At least two SATA hard disk drives (minimum depends on RAID configuration)