IOGear GIC704SR5W6, M0560 User Manual

Installation

Installation Guide

Installation

RAID5 eSATA 1.5Gbps 4 External port PCI Card

GIC704SR5W6

PART NO. M0560

Table of Contents

Caution 4

Introduction 5

Features 6

Package Contents 7

What Is RAID? 8

Installation Procedure 11

Software Installation 18

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Statement

CE Statement 24

Limited Warranty 25

Contact 26

Caution

• Before installation of the controller card, we recommend that users study this manual ﬁ rst. This RAID manual has more information on RAID architecture, RAID features, RAID installation, RAID settings and Management software for the RAID5 GUI (Graphical User Interface).

• Windows Device Manager cannot recognize hard drives without the correct RAID settings in place.

• The working data on your existing hard drive may NOT work when you migrate it to a RAID Host Card conﬁ guration.

• After driver installation you can install the SATARAID5 GUI for RAID management. Before the SATA RAID5 GUI installation, you must remove all existing SATARAID GUIs (or Java SATARAID GUI) to ensure your new SATARAID5 GUI works without issues.

• RAID sets can be created and managed by either the BIOS utility setting or the SATARAID5 GUI setting under Windows.

• If you’re using a used hard drive with the RAID5 card you must perform the “Delete RAID Set” under the BIOS settings. The reason this is necessary is because the used hard drive has system data on it which may cause recognition issues when conﬁ guring it for use with the RAID5 card.

• RAID 0 and RAID1 setups require at least 2 drives, with RAID5 requiring 3 drives and RAID10 requiring 4 drives. If only one drive, make sure to have “Concatenate” or “Contiguous” setting.

Introduction

The board offers the ability to upgrade your desktop computer to RAID 5, RAID 0+1, RAID 0, or RAID 1 as well as JBOD. The board can control four independent Serial ATA channels. Each channel has its own Serial ATA bus and will support one Serial ATA device. The board supports Serial ATA Generation 1 transfer rates of 1.5 Gb/s (150 MB/s).

Features

PCI Interface

Compliant with PCI Speciﬁ cations, Revision 2.2.• Integrated PCI DMA engines.• 32 bit, 33/66MHz fully compliant PCI host interface.•

High Speed Serial ATA Interface

Four high speed Serial ATA interface ports, each supporting 1st generation Serial ATA data rates • (1.5Gb/s). RAID 5 (Distributed Parity RAID) has Highest Read data transaction rate and Good aggregate transfer rate.• Provides RAID 0 (Stripping) to greatly increase the performance of data transfer by simultaneously writing • data to 2 drives. Provides RAID 1 (Mirroring) to protect the data from a disk failure by writing identical data on 2 drives.• RAID 0+1 (Mirrored-Stripping) combine both Striping and Mirroring technologies to provide both the • performance enhancements that come from Striping and the data availability and integrity that comes from Mirroring. JBOD is a virtual disk that combines all disk drives as one entire disk drive.• Fully compliant with Serial ATA 1.0 speciﬁ cations.• Supports Spread Spectrum in receiver.• Independent 256-byte FIFOs (32 bit * 64 deep) per Serial ATA channel for host reads and writes. •

Package Contents

RAID5 SATA-150 4Ports PCI Host Adapter• Quick Start Guide• Driver CD•

What Is RAID?

RAID - Redundant Array of Independent Disks

RAID technology manages multiple disk drives to enhance I/O performance and provide redundancy in order to withstand the failure of any individual drive, without loss of data.

Disk Striping (RAID 0)

Striping is a performance-oriented, non-redundant data mapping technique. While Striping is discussed as a RAID Set type, it actually does not provide fault tolerance. With modern SATA bus technology, multiple I/O operations can be done in parallel, enhancing performance. Striping arrays use multiple disks to form a larger virtual disk.

Disk Mirroring (RAID 1)

Disk mirroring creates an identical twin for a selected disk by having the data simultaneously written to two disks. This redundancy provides instantaneous protection from a single disk failure. If a read failure occurs on one drive, the system simply reads the data from the other drive.

Mirrored-Striping (RAID 0+1 also known as RAID 10)

A Mirrored-Striping Set does just what it says, combining both Striping and Mirroring technologies to provide both the performance enhancements that come from Striping and the data availability and integrity that comes from Mirroring. When data is written to a Mirrored-Striped Set, instead of creating just one virtual disk as Striping would do, a second Mirrored virtual disk is created as well.

Parity RAID (RAID 5)

Parity or RAID 5 adds fault tolerance to Disk Striping by including parity information with the data. Parity RAID dedicates the equivalent of one disk for storing parity stripes. The data and parity information is arranged on the disk array so that parity references are written to different disks. There are at least 3 members to a Parity RAID set.

Parity RAID uses less capacity for protection and is the preferred method to reduce the cost per megabyte for larger installations. Mirroring requires 100% increase in capacity to protect the data whereas the above example only requires a 50% increase. The required capacity decreases as the number of disks in the group increases.

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