After having reviewed the KT7 and commending it for its performance and stability, it is nice to see that new features can still be added to an overall excellent board. Therefore we were very anxious to see what the VIA KT133 chipset teamed up with an IDE-RAID controller would be capable of. RAID, Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a feature that is not available straight out of the box. It is often found in servers and workstations, but was, until just recently, not viable for most others, as it was restricted to SCSI harddisks. Rather, RAID is a protocol, or system of using multiple SCSI and now also IDE harddisks.
RAID uses additional harddisks to improve performance, add reliability, or both at once.
Of course, a large part of making RAID affordable lies not only in reducing the cost of the controller itself, but also in making it compatible with cheaper IDE harddisks. SCSI RAID controllers have been available for quite some time, but most users cannot afford a single SCSI drive, let alone the multiple SCSI harddisks needed for a RAID configuration. Features Continued RAID0, Striping As outlined in previous articles, RAID can improve performance, reliability or both, by using multiple harddisks. To do so, RAID has several modes, the first of which is RAID 0, also known as Striping. Essentially, using multiple disks RAID 0 improves performance by writing to each disk in stripes .