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Appendix B
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
Volum e ( can be
created only using the
PERC S100 Virtual
Disk Management
utility or PERC S300
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
A virtual disk type that links
available space on a single
physical disk and forms a
single logical volume on
which data is stored.
• 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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