Avago Technologies SAS 9300-4i Host Bus Adapter - Manual (Page 25)

LSI Corporation
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SAS-3 Integrated RAID Solution User Guide
November 2012 Chapter 5: Creating Integrated Striping Volumes
Integrated Striping Configuration Overview
Chapter 5: Creating Integrated Striping Volumes
This chapter explains how to create Integrated Striping volumes using the LSI SAS-3 BIOS Configuration Utility
(SAS3 BIOS CU).
5.1 Integrated Striping Configuration Overview
The LSI SAS3 BIOS CU is a menu-driven utility program that enables you to easily configure and manage Integrated
RAID volumes. Use the SAS3 BIOS CU to create one or two Integrated Striping volumes on each LSI SAS-3 controller.
Each volume contains two drives to ten drives. All disks in an Integrated Striping volume must be connected to the
same LSI SAS-3 controller.
Although you can use disks of different sizes in Integrated Striping volumes, the smallest disk in the volume
determines the logical size of all disks in the volume. In other words, the firmware does not use the excess space of the
higher-capacity member disks. For example, if you create an Integrated Striping volume with two 100-GB disks and
two 120-GB disks, the firmware uses only 100 GB on each of the 120-GB disks for the volume. The supported stripe size
is 64 KB.
See Chapter 2 for more information about Integrated Striping volumes.
5.2 Creating Integrated Striping Volumes
The SAS3 BIOS CU is part of the Fusion-MPT BIOS. When the BIOS loads during boot and you see the message about
the LSI Configuration Utility, press Ctrl-C to start the SAS3 BIOS CU. After 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 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.
Each LSI controller can support one or two Integrated RAID volumes. The volumes can include two Integrated Striping
(RAID 0) volumes, two mirrored volumes, or one volume of each type. The two volumes can have a maximum of
14 disk drives. (This configuration includes one or two hot spare disks for mirrored volumes.)
The following guidelines apply when creating an Integrated Striping volume:
 All physical disks in the 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, it is possible to configure one
volume with SAS disks and one volume with SATA disks on the same controller.
 Disks in the volume must have 512-byte blocks and must not have removable media.
 Integrated Striping volumes must have at least 2 disks and no more than 10 disks. Integrated Striping volumes do
not support hot spare disks.