MSI MS-9246 manual B-17, Adaptec SATA RAID Utility for Intel ICH5R, Logical Devices

Adaptec SATA RAID Utility for Intel ICH5R

View

is the default display mode and when expanded, will show the following information about each device:

￿Capacity of the drive

￿Drive manufacturer and model number

￿SCSI drive ID, or Serial ATA port number

When expanded, the Full Size Capacity View button and the Relative Size

Capacity View button represent each drive as a bar. A drive that is not used as part of any array is shaded blue surrounded by a dotted line.

displays a full-length bar for each drive, regardless of capacity.

displays a bar for each drive, with the largest capacity drive full-length and the other drives proportional to the drive capacity, relative to the largest drive.

Any part of a drive used in an array is shown as a gray segment within the bar. Selecting any gray segment will highlight it in amber and, in the Logical Devices view, highlight the array of which this segment is a member.

In either the Full Size Capacity View or the Relative Size Capacity View, a small portion at each end of the drive may be shown in dark gray.

The segment at the end of the drive may vary in size from drive to drive because, in addition to the RAID signature, the controller may also limit the usable capacity of each drive.

This is done because hard disk drives of apparently the same capacity from different manufacturers, or even different models from the same manufacturer, actually vary slightly in the true capacity available. Although, in normal operation this is not an issue, it can be when assigning hot spares or replacing a failed drive.

If the controller used the maximum capacity of each drive and a hot spare or replacement drive was just a few megabytes smaller, it would not be able to replace the failed drive. By rounding drive capacities down to the nearest 2 MB, this possibility is effectively eliminated.

Logical Devices

As described earlier, when Adaptec Storage Manager loads, the Logical Devices view is expanded and you can see the arrays present on the controller.

At the top of this view are the following buttons: Create, Modify, and Delete. Each button opens a wizard for the corresponding function.

Modify allows you to:

Change an array from one RAID level to another

Expand an array

Change the stripe size for a RAID 0

B-17