American Megatrends MegaRAID Express 500 - Manual (Page 58)

MegaRAID Express 500 Hardware Guide 44
Configuring Arrays
Organize the physical disk drives in arrays after the drives are connected to
MegaRAID Express 500, formatted, and initialized. Each array can consist of
one to eight physical disk drives.
MegaRAID Express 500 supports up to eight arrays. The number of drives in a
array determines the RAID levels that can be supported.
Arranging Arrays You must arrange the arrays to provide additional organization for the drive
array. You must arrange arrays so that you can create system drives that can
function as boot devices.
You can sequentially arrange arrays with an identical number of drives so that
the drives in the group are spanned. Spanned drives can be treated as one large
drive. Data can be striped across multiple arrays as one logical drive.
You can create spanned drives by using the MegaRAID BIOS Setup utility or
the MegaRAID Manager.
Creating Hot Spares Any drive that is present, formatted, and initialized but is not included in a
array or logical drive is automatically designated as a hot spare.
You can also designate drives as hot spares via MegaRAID BIOS Setup, the
MegaRAID Manager, or Power Console 500.
Creating Logical Drives Logical drives are arrays or spanned arrays that are presented to the
operating system. You must create one or more logical drives.
The logical drive capacity can include all or any portion of a array. The logical
drive capacity can also be larger than an array by using spanning. MegaRAID
Express 500 supports up to 40 logical drives.