Chapter 5: Concepts
•Choose a stripe block size equal to or smaller than the smallest cache buffer found on any disk drive in your logical drive. A larger value slows the logical drive down because disk drives with smaller cache buffers need more time for multiple accesses to fill their buffers.
•If your data retrieval consists of
Generally speaking, email, POS and webservers prefer smaller stripe block sizes. Video and database applications prefer larger stripe block sizes.
Gigabyte Boundary
This feature is for fault tolerant logical drives (RAID 1, 5, 10 and 50). When a disk drive has failed and the user cannot replace the drive with the same capacity or larger, this feature permits you to install a replacement drive that is slightly smaller (within 1 gigabyte) than the remaining working drives. This can be helpful in the event that a drive fails and an exact replacement model is no longer available.
You must set the Gigabyte Boundary feature to ON when you create your logical drive. Gigabyte Boundary rounds the capacity of all disk drives to the common whole GB drive size. For example, with the Gigabyte Boundary feature enabled, the remaining working drives can be 80.5 GB and the replacement drive can be 80.3, since all are rounded down to 80GB. Note that the rounding function will cause you to lose a small amount of capacity from each disk drive.
Initialization (Fast Init)
This function erases the Master Boot Record (MBR) in all of the selected disk drives. Use this function when one or more disk drives has been used in a previous logical drive.
Hot Spare Drive
Any extra drive that is not assigned to an array is designated Free in the View Drive Assignments screen (see below). In order for a free drive to serve as a hot spare drive, you must designate the free drive as a spare using the WebPAM software.
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