Table 3-1. Features of the PERC S100 controller and PERC S300 controller (continued)

RAID Controller Feature

Description

 

 

Consistency check

A consistency check is a background operation that verifies

(CC)

and corrects the mirror or parity data for fault-tolerant

 

physical disks. It is recommended that you periodically run a

 

consistency check on the physical disks.

 

By default, a consistency check corrects mirror or parity

 

inconsistencies. After the data is corrected, the data on the

 

primary physical disk in a mirror set is assumed to be the

 

correct data and is written to the secondary physical disk in

 

the mirror set.

 

A consistency check cannot be user-initiated in the PERC

 

Virtual Disk Management utility. However, a consistency

 

check can user-initiated when using Dell OpenManage Server

 

Administrator Storage Management.

 

 

Disk initialization

For physical disks, initialization writes metadata to the

 

physical disk, so that the controller can use the physical disk.

 

 

Fault tolerance

The following fault tolerance features are available with the

 

PERC S100 adapter and PERC S300 adapter, in order to

 

prevent data loss in case of a failed physical disk:

 

• Physical disk failure detection (automatic).

 

• Virtual disk rebuild using hot spares (automatic, if the hot

 

spare is configured for this functionality).

 

• Parity generation and checking (RAID 5 only).

 

Hot-swap manual replacement of a physical disk without

 

rebooting the system (only for systems with a backplane that

 

allows hot-swapping).

 

If one side of a RAID 1 (mirror) fails, data can be rebuilt by

 

using the physical disk on the other side of the mirror.

 

If a physical disk in RAID 5 fails, parity data exists on the

 

remaining physical disks, which can be used to restore the

 

data to a new, replacement physical disk configured as a hot

 

spare.

 

If a physical disk fails in RAID 10, the virtual disk remains

 

functional and data is read from the surviving mirrored

 

physical disk(s). A single disk failure in each mirrored set can

 

be sustained, depending on how the mirrored set fails.

Features

23

Page 23
Image 23
Dell PERC S300, (PERC) S100 manual Allows hot-swapping