Caution – Creating RAID volumes using the on-board disk controller destroys all data on the member disks. The disk controller’s volume initialization procedure reserves a portion of each physical disk for metadata and other internal information used by the controller. Once the volume initialization is complete, you can configure the volume and label it using format(1M). You can then use the volume in the Solaris Operating System.

Hardware Raid Operations

On the server, the SAS controller supports mirroring and striping using the Solaris OS raidctl utility.

A hardware RAID volume created under the raidctl utility behaves slightly differently than one created using volume management software. Under a software volume, each device has its own entry in the virtual device tree, and read-write operations are performed to both virtual devices. Under hardware RAID volumes, only one device appears in the device tree. Member disk devices are invisible to the operating system, and are accessed only by the SAS controller.

Physical Disk Slot Numbers, Physical Device Names, and Logical Device Names for Non-RAID Disks

If your system encounters a disk error, often you can find messages about failing or failed disks in the system console. This information is also logged in the /var/adm/messages files.

These error messages typically refer to a failed hard drive by its physical device name (such as /devices/pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@8/scsi@2/sd@1,0) or by its logical device name (such as c0t0d0). In addition, some applications might report a disk slot number (0 or 1).

42 SPARC Enterprise T1000 Server Administration Guide • April 2007