These chips may be found on both Intel and other brand Pentium 4 processor motherboards such as Asus, MSI, etc. They offer a low cost RAID solution for home users and entry-level business users.

RAID 1 (mirroring) requires two hard disks of equal size and is the recommend configuration due to the fact that it provides automatic backup protection of your primary hard disk, greatly increasing the chance that your system will continue to run and the data will be safe if one of the two drives fails.

RAID 0 (striping) is a way to greatly increase the I/O performance of your storage subsystem because the data is broken down into blocks, and each block is written to a separate disk drive. However it comes at the cost of having no fault tolerance - if one disk fails all data will be lost.  Therefore RAID 0 is only recommend for temporary storage of large data files you are working with, not for permanent storage, the operating system, or mission-critical applications.

1) Floppy Configuration Utility (driver): This is a utility that creates a setup floppy disk with Intel Application Accelerator RAID files which can be used to preinstall RAID driver (using F6 during Windows setup). Requires you have blank floppy disk.

2) Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition (IAAR): This is the Windows-based software package. The Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition software package provides support for high-performance Serial ATA RAID 0 arrays and redundant RAID 1 arrays on  select Intel 865 and 875 chipset-based platforms using Windows XP or Windows 2000

System Requirements

• Intel® Pentium® 4 processor
• Motherboard with a supported Intel® chipset
• Supported operating system
• Two Serial ATA hard drives (Generation 1 compatible)

Setting up a RAID 0 or 1 Volumes using using Windows XP (process is same for 2000):  The RAID driver MUST be installed before the operating system is installed on the array. The following steps outline how to build a RAID 0 or 1 volume using two SATA hard disk drives:

• Assemble the system using a motherboard that supports Intel RAID Technology and attach two SATA hard drives.
• Enter System BIOS Setup then ensure that Intel RAID Technology is enabled (this enables the option ROM). When done, exit Setup.
• Upon re-boot you will see the Intel RAID BIOS status message on the screen - press CTRL-I to enter the Intel RAID Option ROM user interface.
• Within this interface select option 1 'Create RAID Volume'.

• Specify a RAID Volume name and then press the <TAB> or <ENTER> key to advance to the next field.

• Select the strip value for the RAID 0 or RAID 1 array by scrolling through the available values by using the <up arrow> or <down arrow> keys and pressing the <Enter> key to select and advance to the next field.

• Select the RAID level by scrolling through the available values by using the <up arrow> or <down arrow> keys and pressing the <Enter> key to select and advance to the next field.
• From the Strip size, press the <Tab> or <ENTER> key to advance to the ‘Create Volume’ prompt. Press the <Enter> key to create the specified volume.  Confirm this selection by pressing the <Y> key after the prompt.
• Scroll to option 4 ‘Exit’ and press the <Enter> key to exit the RAID Configuration utility. Confirm the exit by pressing <Y> key
• Begin Windows XP Setup by booting from the installation CD.
• At the beginning of Windows XP Setup, press F6 to install a third-party SCSI or RAID driver. When prompted, insert a floppy disk containing the Intel RAID driver. After reading the floppy disk, the 'Intel® 82801ER SATA RAID Controller' will be presented -- select this driver to install.
• Finish the Windows XP installation and install all necessary drivers.
• Install the Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition 3.5 software via the CD-ROM included with your motherboard or after downloading it from the Internet. This will add the Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition 3.5 user interface utility that can be used to manage the RAID configuration.

There are several other things you can do within the utility such as deleting a RAID volume, but be warned that all data will be lost of you do this. For fault-tolerance recovery see below.

RAID 1 = RAID 1 mirrors your data to a second drive so in the event of a failure you can still boot using the good SATA hard disk until it can be repaired. If this happens turn off the system, replace the defective hard disk (note which SATA port it is connected to, PORT 0 or PORT 1), then you can then boot into Windows, open the Intel Application Accelerator RAID Edition interface (located under Programs menu) and rebuild the mirror to the new hard disk.