Ciprico 6500 - Manual (Page 49)

6500 Disk Array User’s Guide 21020690 B
Chapter 3 Display/Operation Panel
FORMAT Page 3 - 19
FORMAT From
)81&7,21 6(/(&7, use the left/right arrow keys to select )250$7
(“Menu Structure (4 of 5—Format & Drives)” on page 3-9).
Each disk in the array is written with a special “system sector” during
formatting that holds information about the array. For this reason, an array must
be formatted before it can be used. All arrays are formatted completely before
shipment. You must format the array only if, on power-up or reset, you see a
display similar to the following, which indicates that drives 9, 6, 5, and 4 in the
array are unformatted.
Note If this type of display appears, format drives as described in
Chapter 4 of this guide.
SECTOR SIZE The sector size options for 6500 arrays, expressed in bytes per sector, are 512,
1024, 2048, 4096, and 8192. Factory default setting is 512.
DATA FILL This option writes a pattern to the data disks in the array, generates parity data,
and writes the parity data to the parity disk. If you do not choose to use data
fill, you may get an inter-drive parity error if you perform a read operation
before a write operation after format. The settings for this option are
21 and
2)). When set to 21, the array writes data to the drives in order to initialize
the parity drive. The default setting is
21.
START This selection must be set to
<(6 before you press SELECT in order to format
the array.