Adaptec SAS/SATA/SCSI RAID Controllers Standard RAID Controller Features

Chapter 3: About Your RAID Controller ●16

Standard RAID Controller Features

●Flash ROM for updates to controller firmware, BIOS, and the Adaptec RAID

Configuration utility

●Disk drive hot-swapping

●Event logging and broadcasting including email and SNMP messages

●Multiple options for creating and managing RAID arrays—A full software application

(Adaptec Storage Manager), a BIOS-based utility, a command line utility, and a DOS

utility. See Managing Your Storage Space on page 55 for more information.

●(SAS and SATA RAID controllers only) Native command queuing (NCQ), which lets disk

drives arrange commands into the most efficient order for optimum performance

●(SATA and SCSI RAID controllers only) Support for disk drive enclosures with SAF-TE

enclosure management hardware

●(SAS RAID controllers only) Support for disk drive enclosures with SES2 enclosure

management hardware

●Some RAID controllers support adding a battery backup module (see page 17).

Note:

For more information, refer to the Adaptec Storage Manager User’s Guide for Internal RAID

Storage

or online Help.

●Support for RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, RAID 501, simple volumes, and spanned

volumes

●Support for hot spares (global and dedicated)

●

Support for automatic failover, so arrays are automatically rebuilt when a failed disk drive is

replaced (applies to redundant arrays in SES2- or SAF-TE-enabled disk drive enclosures

only

)

●Optimized disk utilization, which ensures that the full capacity of all disk drives can be

used, even if the disk drives vary in size

●

Online capacity expa nsion, so you can inc rease the capacity of an array without recreating it

●Support for array migration from one RAID level to another

●Copyback Hot Spare—You can use this feature to move data from a hot spare back to its

original location after a failed disk drive is replaced.

●Striped Mirror (RAID 1E)—A RAID 1 Enhanced array is similar to a RAID 1 array except

that data is both mirrored and striped, and more disk drives can be included.

●Hot Space (RAID 5EE)—A RAID 5EE array is similar to a RAID 5 array except that it

includes a distributed spare and must be built from a minimum of four disk drives.

●Dual Drive Failure Protection (RAID 6)—A RAID 6 array is similar to a RAID 5 array

except that it includes two independent sets of parity data instead of one.

1 The Adaptec 2420SA RAID controller supports RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 50, simple, and spanned volumes.