Dell S300, S100 manual Understanding RAID Levels

Understanding RAID Levels

A PERC S100 controller or PERC S300 controller supports the following RAID levels:

Table B-1. RAID Levels and Characteristics

RAID Level Main Characteristics Advantages

Volume (can be	A virtual disk type that links
created only using the	available space on a single
PERC S100 Virtual	physical disk and forms a
Disk Management	single logical volume on
utility or PERC S300	which data is stored.
Virtual Disk
Management utility.
Dell OpenManage
Server Administrator
Storage Management
can manage a Volume
but cannot create it.)

NOTE: Unless mentioned otherwise, the term PERC Virtual Disk Management utility refers to both the PERC S100 Virtual Disk Management utility and the PERC S300 Virtual Disk Management utility

•Concatenation allows access to a single physical disk.

•Concatenation does not provide performance benefits or data redundancy.

•When a physical disk in a concatenated virtual disk fails, data is lost from that virtual disk. Because there is no redundancy, data can be restored only from a backup.

RAID 0 (striping)	Provides the highest
	performance, but no data
	redundancy. Data in the
	virtual disk is striped
	(distributed) across two or
	more physical disks.

RAID 0 virtual disks are useful for holding information, such as the operating system paging file, where performance is extremely important but redundancy is not.

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Appendix B