Avago Technologies SAS 9300-4i Host Bus Adapter - Manual (Page 14)

LSI Corporation
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SAS-3 Integrated RAID Solution User Guide
November 2012 Chapter 3: Creating Mirrored Volumes
Mirrored Volume Configuration Overview
Chapter 3: Creating Mirrored Volumes
This chapter explains how to create Integrated Mirroring volumes, Integrated Mirroring + Striping volumes, and
Integrated Mirroring Enhanced volumes with the LSI SAS-3 BIOS Configuration Utility (SAS3 BIOS CU).
3.1 Mirrored Volume Configuration Overview
The LSI SAS3 BIOS CU is a menu-driven utility program that enables you to easily configure and manage Integrated
RAID volumes. You can use the SAS3 BIOS CU to create one or two mirrored volumes on each LSI SAS-3 controller, with
up to two optional global hot spare disks. You must connect all disks in a mirrored volume to the same LSI SAS-3
controller.
Although you can use disks of different sizes in mirrored volumes, the smallest disk in the volume determines the
logical size of all disks in the volume. In other words, the volume does not use the excess space of the higher-capacity
member disks. For example, if you create an Integrated Mirroring Enhanced volume with two 100-GB disks and two
120-GB disks, the volume uses only 100 GB on each of the 120-GB disks.
See Chapter 2 for more information about the features of Integrated Mirroring, Integrated Mirroring + Striping, and
Integrated Mirroring Enhanced volumes.
3.2 Creating Mirrored Volumes
The SAS3 BIOS CU is part of the Fusion-MPT BIOS. When the BIOS loads during the startup sequence and you see the
message about the LSI Configuration Utility, press Ctrl-C to start the SAS3 BIOS CU. When you start the SAS3 BIOS CU,
the message changes to the following:
Please wait, invoking SAS Configuration Utility...
After a brief pause, the main menu (Adapter List window) of the SAS3 BIOS CU appears. On some systems, however,
the following message appears next:
LSI Corp Configuration Utility will load following initialization!
In this case, the SAS3 BIOS CU loads after the system completes its power-on self-test.
You can configure one or two Integrated Mirroring, Integrated Mirroring + Striping, and Integrated Mirroring
Enhanced volumes on each LSI SAS-3 controller. Alternatively, you can configure one mirrored volume and one
Integrated Striping volume on the same controller, up to a maximum of 14 disk drives for the two volumes. (The
maximum number includes one or two optional hot spare disks for the mirrored volume or volumes.) Additional
information about configuring a RAID volume follows:
 All physical disks in a volume must be either SATA (with extended command set support) or SAS (with SMART
support). You cannot combine SAS and SATA disks in the same volume. However, you can create one volume with
SAS disks and a second volume with SATA disks on the same controller.
 Disks in the volume must have 512-byte blocks and must not have removable media.
 Integrated Mirroring volumes must have two disks, Integrated Mirroring Enhanced volumes contain three disks to
ten disks, and Integrated Mirroring + Striping volumes can have four, six, eight, or ten disks.
NOTE LSI strongly recommends that you create global hot spare disks for all mirrored volumes to increase the
level of data protection. If a disk in a mirrored volume fails, the Integrated RAID firmware rebuilds it using one
of the global hot spares, and the data is safe. If you create two mirrored volumes on an LSI SAS-3 controller,
either of the volumes can use the global hot spares if a disk fails.