LSI SAS2 manual Creating Integrated Striping Volumes

SAS2 Integrated RAID Solution User Guide Chapter 5: Creating Integrated Striping Volumes Integrated Striping Configuration Over-

Chapter 5

Creating Integrated Striping Volumes

This chapter explains how to create Integrated Striping volumes using the LSI SAS2 BIOS Configuration Utility (SAS2 BIOS CU).

5.1Integrated Striping Configuration Overview

5.2Creating Integrated Striping Volumes

The LSI SAS2 BIOS CU is a menu-driven utility program that enables you to easily configure and manage Integrated RAID volumes. You can use the SAS2 BIOS CU to create one or two Integrated Striping volumes on each LSI SAS2 controller. Each volume can have from two-to-ten drives. All disks in an Integrated Striping volume must be connected to the same LSI SAS2 controller.

Although you can use disks of different size 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 disk(s). 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-MB disks for the volume. The supported stripe size is 64 kilobytes.

Refer to Chapter 4 for more information about Integrated Striping volumes.

The SAS2 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-Cto start the CU. After you do this, the message changes to:

Please wait, invoking SAS Configuration Utility...

After a brief pause, the main menu of the SAS2 BIOS CU appears. On some systems, however, the following message appears next:

LSI Corp Configuration Utility will load following initialization!

In this case, the SAS2 BIOS CU loads after the system completes its power-on self-test.

You can configure one or two Integrated RAID volumes on each LSI SAS2 controller. For a two-volume configuration, you can have 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 an Integrated Striping 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, you can create one volume with SAS disks and a second volume with SATA disks on the same controller.

LSI Corporation Confidential August 2010 Page 25