STORAGE

• RAID 0 disk striping support for highest system and application performance
• RAID 1 disk mirroring support for fault tolerance
• RAID 0 +1 disk striping and mirroring support for highest performance with fault tolerance
• Support for both SATA and ATA-133 disk controller standards
• Dual independent SATA controllers**
  - Supports up to 4 SATA disk drives simultaneously
• Integrated SATA PHY with support for two drives**
• Digital SATA interface for external PHY with support for two drives**
• Fast Ultra ATA-133 Disk Drive Controllers
  - Each interface supports two devices, for support for up to six devices
  - Supports UltraDMA modes 6-0 (UltraDMA 33/66/100/133)
  - Industry-standard PCI bus master IDE register set
  - Separate independent IDE connections for 5V-tolerant primary and secondary interfaces

** NVIDIA nForce3 250Gb and 250 only.

The last area that we will look at is the storage capabilities of the Nforce 3 250. The tech specs basically cover the functionality that RAID controller provides. The most interesting point is that it can support a mix of SATA and IDE controllers in a RAID configuration with up to 8 disks.

For a primer on RAID check out the FAQ we have here. Nvidia supports another mode, JBOD which means just a bunch of disks meaning that the disks in the array are just treated as a contiguous volume. One of the neat features in RAID1 configuration is the ability to specify an additional disk as a backup in case of a failure. In the event that there is a failure, this extra disk will automatically be used to as a backup for the failed disk so downtime to replace the disk will not be necessary. Users are also not limited to a single array. Both a RAID0 and a RAID1 array can be specified for example.