LSI SAS2 manual Overview of Integrated Striping, Boot disk or as a data disk

SAS2 Integrated RAID Solution User Guide Chapter 4: Overview of Integrated Striping Introduction

Chapter 4

Overview of Integrated Striping

This chapter provides an overview of the LSI Integrated RAID features that support the creation of striped arrays.

4.1 Introduction	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 a more
	expensive RAID striping solution. You can configure an Integrated Striping volume as
	the boot disk or as 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 as a single, logical drive. In
	general, striping is transparent to the BIOS, the drivers, and the operating system.
	You can use the LSI SAS2 BIOS CU to configure Integrated Striping volumes. These
	volumes can consist of two-to-ten disks.

4.2Integrated Striping Features Integrated Striping supports the following features:

Support for volumes with two-to-ten disks

Support for two Integrated Striping volumes with up to 14 drives total on a SAS2 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 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

SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) status LED support for drives used in Integrated Striping volumes

LSI Corporation Confidential August 2010 Page 23