Dell PowerVault MD3200i - Manual (Page 37)

Planning: MD3200i Series Storage Array Terms and Concepts 37
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Planning: MD3200i Series Storage
Array Terms and Concepts
This chapter explains terms and concepts used for configuration and
operation of MD3200i Series storage arrays.
Physical Disks, Virtual Disks, and Disk Groups
Physical disks in your storage array provide the physical storage capacity for
your data. Before you can begin writing data to the storage array, you must
configure the physical storage capacity into logical components, called disk
groups and virtual disks.
A disk group is a set of physical disks upon which multiple virtual disks are
created. The maximum number of physical disks supported in a disk group is
120 disks (or 192 disks with Premium Feature activation) for RAID 0, RAID 1,
and RAID 10, and 30 drives for RAID 5 and RAID 6. You can create disk
groups from unconfigured capacity on your storage array.
A virtual disk is a partition in a disk group that is made up of contiguous data
segments of the physical disks in the disk group. A virtual disk consists of data
segments from all physical disks in the disk group. Virtual disks and disk
groups are set up according to how you plan to organize your data. For
example, you may have one virtual disk for inventory, a second virtual disk for
financial and tax information, and so on.
All virtual disks in a disk group support the same RAID level. The storage
array supports up to 255 virtual disks (minimum size of 10 MB each) that can
be assigned to host servers. Each virtual disk is assigned a Logical Unit
Number (LUN) that is recognized by the host operating system.
Physical Disks
Only Dell supported 6.0-Gbps SAS physical disks are supported in the storage
array. If the storage array detects unsupported physical disks, it marks the disk
as unsupported and the physical disk becomes unavailable for all operations.
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