Toshiba Magnia 560S - Manual (Page 72)

Configuring Logical Drives 54
Configuring RAID Controller Kit-G
Configuring Logical Drives
After you have installed the RAID Controller Kit-G controller in the server and have
attached all physical drives, perform the following steps to prepare a RAID disk array:
1. Optimize the RAID Controller Kit-G controller options for your system.
See Chapter 6 for additional information.
2. Perform a low-level format on the SCSI drives that will be included in the array and
the drives to be used for hot spares.
3. Press <Ctrl><M> to run the MegaRAID Manager .
4. Define and configure one or more logical drives by selecting Easy Configuration or
New Configuration to customize the RAID array.
5. Create and configure one or more system drives (logical drives) by selecting the
RAID level, cache policy, read policy, and write policy.
6. Save the configuration.
7. Initialize the system drives.
After initialization, you can install the operating system.
Optimizing Data Storage
Data Access Requirements
Each type of data stored in the disk subsystem has a different frequency of read and
write activity. If you know the data access requirements, you can more successfully
determine a strategy for optimizing the disk subsystem capacity, availability, and
performance.
Servers that support Video on Demand typically read the data often, but write data
infrequently. Both the read and write operations tend to be long. Data stored on a
general-purpose file server involves relatively short read and write operations with
relatively small files.
Array Functions
You must first define the major purpose of the disk array. Will this disk array increase
the system storage capacity for general-purpose file and print servers? Does this disk
array support any software system that must be available 24 hours per day? Will the
information stored in this disk array contain large audio or video files that must be
available on demand? Will this disk array contain data from an imaging system?
You must identify the purpose of the data to be stored in the disk subsystem before you
can confidently choose a RAID level and a RAID configuration.