NOTE: Mirrored physical disks improve read performance by read load balancing.

NOTE: The PERC S300 controller only supports physical disks (SAS and SATA). SSD devices cannot be migrated to a PERC S300 controller.

Figure 2-2. Example of Disk Mirroring (RAID 1)

Stripe element 1 Stripe element 1 Duplicated

Stripe element 2 Stripe element 2 Duplicated

Stripe element 3 Stripe element 3 Duplicated

Stripe element 4 Stripe element 4 Duplicated

Spanned RAID Levels

Spanning is a term used to describe the way in which RAID level 10 is constructed from multiple sets of simpler RAID levels. For example, a RAID 10 has multiple sets of RAID 1 disk arrays in which each RAID 1 set is considered a span. Data is then striped (as it is in RAID 0) across the RAID 1 spans to create a RAID 10 virtual disk.

Parity Data

Parity data is redundant data that has been generated to provide fault tolerance within certain RAID levels. In the event of a drive failure, the parity data can be used by the controller to regenerate user data. Parity data is present only for RAID 5 disk arrays.

The parity data is distributed across all the physical disks in the system. If a single physical disk fails, it can be rebuilt from the parity and the data on the remaining physical disks. RAID 5 combines distributed parity with disk striping, as shown in Figure 2-3. Parity provides redundancy for one physical disk failure without duplicating the contents of entire physical disks.

Overview

19

Page 19
Image 19
Dell PERC S300, (PERC) S100 manual Spanned RAID Levels, Parity Data