RAID installation guide for Silicon Image 3112A

Short Description
This document provides a brief step-by-step guide for beginners in how to set up a RAID drive using the onboard SiI 3112 controller, operating under the Windows XP environment. This guide was designed to only cover the basic operations in setting up RAID.

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Content
…A RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) controller lets you combine multiple hard disks to simulate a single drive. The drive created will properties different to that of the individual drives.
The obvious advantage of using a RAID configuration is the ability to create drives with larger capacity. However, since multiple drives are used, data can be stored in such a way that it spans over many disks, thus the information can be accessed by the disks simultaneously, significantly improving data access times.
Using many drives has a disadvantage. The probability of a single drive failing out of many drives is much higher than that of one failing out of only one. This results in a greater chance of losing the information on your disks. There are ways however, to minimize this effect, even making it more reliable than using single disks.
There are many different ways in which RAID can be configured, each with its set of advantages and disadvantages. The Silicon Image® controller supports the RAID 0 and RAID 1 configurations.
RAID 0 works by breaking down data and spreading it over multiple disk drives. RAID 0 does not protect data from failure, and due to the way it stores data, a fault on one drive would result in failure of the entire array. It does however, have vast improvements in both reading and writing speeds, with the theoretical speed proportional to the number of disks used in the array. It is also fairly efficient in using disk space, with its size is equal to the size of the smallest disk multiplied by the number of disks.
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