Toshiba Magnia 560S - Manual (Page 69)

Configuring SCSI Physical Drives
Configuring RAID Controller Kit-G
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Configuring Arrays
Organize the physical disk drives in arrays after the drives are connected to RAID
Controller Kit-G, formatted, and initialized. An array can consist of up to 15 physical
drives, depending on the RAID level.
RAID Controller Kit-G supports up to eight arrays. The number of drives in an array
determines the RAID levels that can be supported.
Arranging Arrays
You must arrange the arrays to provide additional organization for the drive array. You
must arrange arrays so that you can create system drives that can function as boot
devices.
You can sequentially arrange arrays with an identical number of drives so that the
drives in the group are spanned. Spanned drives can be treated as one large drive. Data
can be striped across multiple arrays as one logical drive.
You can create spanned drives by using the MegaRAID BIOS Configuration Utility.
Creating Hot Spares
Any drive that is present, formatted, and initialized but is not included in a array or
logical drive is automatically designated as a hot spare.
You can also designate drives as hot spares using the MegaRAID BIOS Configuration
Utility or Power Console Plus.
Creating Logical Drives
Logical drives are arrays or spanned arrays that are presented to the operating system.
You must create one or more logical drives.
The logical drive capacity can include all or any portion of an array. The logical drive
capacity can also be larger than an array by using spanning. RAID Controller Kit-G
supports up to 40 logical drives.
Configuration Strategies
The most important factors in RAID array configuration are drive capacity, drive
availability (fault tolerance), and drive performance. You cannot configure a logical
drive that optimizes all three factors, but it is easy to choose a logical drive
configuration that maximizes one factor at the expense of the other two factors,
although needs are seldom that simple.