Avago Technologies SAS 9300-4i Host Bus Adapter - Manual (Page 6)

LSI Corporation
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SAS-3 Integrated RAID Solution User Guide
November 2012 Chapter 1: Introduction to the Integrated RAID Solution
Benefits and Features
1.2 Benefits and Features
The LSI Integrated RAID solution has the following benefits and features:
 Support for up to 10 disks per Integrated RAID volume, with one or two volumes on each SAS-3 controller. Each
controller can support 14 volume drives, including one or two hot spare disks.
 Support for two-disk Integrated Mirroring volumes (RAID 1).
 Support for disk drives with 512-byte sectors and disk drives with 4-KB sectors.
 Support for online capacity expansion (OCE) for RAID 1 volumes. OCE permits you to increase the size of a RAID 1
volume by replacing the disk drives with higher-capacity drives.
 Support for RAID volumes, and physical disks within a RAID volume, where the volume or disk exceeds 2
41
bytes
(2.199 TB or 2 TiB).
 Low-cost RAID volume creation, which meets the needs of most internal RAID installations.
 Easy installation and configuration.
 Support for booting from any kind of Integrated RAID volume.
 Ability to operate without special operating system-specific software.
 High reliability and data integrity.
— Nonvolatile write journaling.
— Physical disks in a volume are not visible to the operating system (OS) or to application software.
 Low host CPU utilization and PCI® bus utilization.
 Processing power provided by Fusion-MPT architecture. Shared-memory architecture minimizes external
memory requests.
1.2.1 Host Interface
The Integrated RAID host interface uses the message-passing interface, as described in the Fusion-MPT 2.5 MPI
Specification. The Fusion-MPT interface gives the host OS access to the RAID volumes as well as to additional non-RAID
physical disks.
1.2.2 Metadata Support
The Integrated RAID firmware supports metadata, which describes the RAID volume configuration stored on each
member disk of a volume. After initialization, the firmware reads the metadata on each member disk and verifies the
configuration. The firmware reduces the usable disk space for each member disk when it creates the volume to make
room for the metadata.
1.2.3 SMART Support
The Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) monitors disk drives for signs of possible future disk
failure and generates an alert if it detects such signs. The Integrated RAID firmware polls each physical disk in the
volume at regular intervals. If the firmware detects a SMART ASC/ASCQ code on a physical disk in the volume, it stores
the SMART data in a log.
NOTE An Integrated RAID volume must use all 512-byte-sector drives or all 4-KB-sector drives. You
cannot combine the two types of drives in a single volume. Also, some operating systems do not fully
support 4-KB-sector drives. Refer to the documentation for the operating system you are using.