Dell 3 - Manual (Page 98)

96 Configuring PERC 3
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Configuring Logical Drives
After you have installed the PERC 3 controller in the server and have
attached all physical disk drives, perform the following steps to prepare a
RAID disk array:
1 Optimize the PERC 3 controller options for your system.
2 Press <Ctrl> <M> to run the BIOS Configuration Utility.
3 Define and configure one or more logical drives.
4 Select Easy Configuration in the PERC 3 BIOS Configuration Utility
or select New Configuration to customize the RAID array.
5 Create and configure one or more system drives (logical drives).
6 Select the RAID level, cache policy, read policy, and write policy.
7 Save the configuration.
8 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.
5 3 32
10 4 16
50 6 256
(PERC has a limit of 60, using
PERC 4/QC with 15 drives on each
of the 4 channels.)
Ta b l e 7 - 1 0 . P h y s i c a l D r i v e s R e q u i r e d f o r E a c h R A I D L e v e l
RAID
Level Minimum Number of
Physical Drives Maximum Number of Physical
Drives