How to Setup a RAID System

RAID Configuration (Cont’d)

Intel RAID configuration utility main menu is shown in Figure 11. This screen will appear after you press Control I while the text shown in Figure 9 appears after you turn on your computer.

Figure 11: RAID configuration utility

All RAID utilities are very similar and very easy to use. In our example the main screen shows information about the hard disk drives and presents four options. Select the first one, Create RAID Volume, to setup your RAID system. The screen in Figure 12 will be shown.

Figure 12: Creating your RAID system

Here you will have to configure:

• Volume Name: The name under which your operating system will access your RAID system.
• RAID Level: The RAID type you want, RAID0 (data striping, for improving performance) or RAID1 (mirroring, for improving reliability). Other RAID types will be available depending on the RAID chip you have.
• Disks: For selecting the disks you want to include in this RAID array.
• Stripe size: This is the size of the data chunks your RAID system will use. Roughly speaking, this is like the size of each “sector” your hard disk drive will use. The ideal size is the subject of a lot of debate. Generally speaking, bigger stripes are better if you work with big files, while smaller stripes are better if you work with small files. If you don’t have any idea of what value to use, leave it on its default size (usually 64 KB or 128 KB). Click here to read a performance test we did using several different stripe sizes.
• Capacity: Here you can configure a lower capacity in order to create more than one RAID volume (as if you were “partitioning” your RAID array, i.e., creating two or more “RAID drives”). For example, instead of having just one 160 GB array we could configure one 100 GB array and another with 50 GB, so the operating system will recognize them as separated disks, even though both will be using the RAID system.

After hitting “Create Volume” a confirmation screen will be shown, remember that all your data will be lost. Hit “Y” and your RAID will be created.

Figure 13: Confirmation screen

Figure 14: Main menu, now with our RAID array created

You can see our RAID array created in Figure 14. As you can see, we created a RAID0 (striping) system.
Now that our RAID system is created, you will need to install the operating system. This is the trickiest part of the RAID setup process.