8-1
Chapter 8Integrated Striping
This chapter provides an overview of the LSI Integrated Striping™ (IS) feature and
explains how to create Integrated Striping (IS) volumes using the SAS BIOS
Configuration Utility (SAS BIOS CU), which is used to setup IR Mode.

8-1 Introduction

The Integrated Striping (IS) feature is used for applications that require the faster
performance and increased storage capacity of striping. The low-cost IS feature has
many of the advantages of a more expensive RAID striping solution. A single IS logical
drive may be configured as the boot disk or as a data disk.
The IS feature is implemented with controller firmware that supports the Fusion-MPT
Interface. IS provides better performance and more capacity than individual disks,
without burdening the host CPU. The firmware splits host I/Os over multiple disks and
presents the disks as a single logical drive. In general, striping is transparent to the
BIOS, the drivers, and the operating system.
The SAS BIOS CU is used to configure IS volumes, which can consist of two to ten
disks.

8-2 IS Features

Integrated Striping supports the following features:
• Support for volumes with two to ten disks
• Support for two IS volumes (or one IS volume and one IM/IME volume) on a
controller, with up to 12 disks total. (Requires Integrated RAID firmware v1.20.00 or
above.)
• Presents a single virtual drive to the OS for each configured volume
• Support for both SAS and SATA drives, although the two types of drives cannot be
combined in one volume
• Fusion-MPT architecture
• Easy-to-use SAS BIOS configuration utility
• Error notification
• Use of metadata to store volume configuration on disks
• OS-specific event log
• Error display inside the Fusion-MPT BIOS
NOTE: All physical disks in a volume must be connected to the same SAS
controller.