w w w . d e l l . c o m s u p p o r t . d e l l . c o m

NOTE: Spanning two contiguous RAID 0 logical drives does not produce a new RAID level or add fault tolerance. It does increase the size of the logical volume and improves performance by doubling the number of spindles.

Spanning for RAID 10 or RAID 50

Table 2-1 describes how to configure RAID 10 and RAID 50 by spanning.

Ta b l e 2 - 1 . S p a n n i n g f o r R A I D 1 0 a nd R A I D 5 0

Level Description

10Configure RAID 10 by spanning two contiguous RAID 1 logical drives. The RAID 1 logical drives must have the same stripe size.

NOTE: Refer to Chapter 11 "PERC 3 BIOS Configuration Utility" for the configuration procedure for spanning RAID 1 logical drives.

50Configure RAID 50 by spanning two contiguous RAID 5 logical drives. The RAID 5 logical drives must have the same stripe size.

NOTE: Refer to Chapter 11 "PERC 3 BIOS Configuration Utility" for the configuration procedure for spanning RAID 5 logical drives.

Parity

Parity generates a set of redundancy data from two or more parent data sets. The redundancy data can be used to reconstruct one of the parent data sets. Parity data does not fully duplicate the parent data sets. In RAID, this method is applied to entire drives or stripes across all disk drives in an array. The types of parity are shown in Table 2-2.

Ta b l e 2 - 2 . Ty pe s o f Par i t y

Parity Type

Description

 

 

Dedicated

The parity of the data on two or more disk drives is stored on an

 

additional disk.

 

 

Distributed

The parity data is distributed across all drives in the system.

 

 

If a single disk drive fails, it can be rebuilt from the parity and the data on the remaining drives. RAID level 5 combines distributed parity with disk striping. Parity provides redundancy for one drive failure without duplicating the contents of entire disk drives, but parity generation can slow the write process. A dedicated parity scheme during normal read/write operations is shown in Figure 2-4.

36

Introduction to RAID

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Dell 3 manual Spanning for RAID 10 or RAID, Parity, Describes how to configure RAID 10 and RAID 50 by spanning