Avago Technologies SAS 9300-4i Host Bus Adapter - Manual (Page 23)

LSI Corporation
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SAS-3 Integrated RAID Solution User Guide
November 2012 Chapter 4: Overview of Integrated Striping
Overview
Chapter 4: Overview of Integrated Striping
This chapter provides an overview of the LSI Integrated RAID features that support the creation of striped volumes.
4.1 Overview
The LSI Integrated RAID solution enables you to create Integrated Striping volumes for applications that require the
faster performance and increased storage capacity of striping. The low-cost Integrated Striping feature has many of
the advantages of more expensive RAID striping solutions. An Integrated Striping volume can be the boot disk or a
data disk.
The Integrated Striping solution provides better performance and more capacity than individual disks, without
burdening the host CPU. The firmware distributes host I/O transactions over multiple disks and presents the disks to
the OS as a single volume. In general, striping is transparent to the BIOS, the drivers, and the operating system.
Use the LSI SAS3 BIOS CU to configure Integrated Striping volumes.
4.2 Integrated Striping Features
Integrated Striping supports the following features:
 Support for RAID volumes with two disks to ten disks
 Support for two Integrated Striping volumes with up to 14 drives total on a SAS-3 controller
 Support for combining one Integrated Striping volume and one Integrated Mirroring, Integrated Mirroring +
Striping, or Integrated Mirroring Enhanced volume on a single controller
 Support for both SAS and SATA drives, although you cannot combine the two types of drives in one volume
 Fusion-MPT architecture
 Easy-to-use SAS-3 BIOS configuration utility
 Error notification
 Disk write caching, which is enabled by default on all Integrated Striping volumes
 Use of metadata to store volume configurations on disks
 OS-specific event log
 Error display inside the Fusion-MPT BIOS
 SES status LED support for drives used in Integrated Striping volumes