Users Guide

Table 11. RAID level and number of disks
RAID Level Minimum Number of Disks
1 2
5 3
6 4
10 4
50 6
60 8
* For PERC S110 and S130 RAID controllers, a minimum of two hard-disk drives are required.
Selecting physical disks
Use the Select Physical Disks screen to select the physical disks to be used for the virtual drive and select the physical disk
drive-related properties.
The number of physical disks required for the virtual disk varies depending on the RAID level. The minimum and maximum
numbers of physical disks required for the RAID level are displayed on the screen.
● Protocol — Select the protocol for the disk pool: Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Serial ATA (SATA). SAS drives are
used for high performance, while SATA drives provide a more cost-effective solution. A disk pool is a logical grouping of
physical disk drives on which one or more virtual drives can be created. The protocol is the type of technology used to
implement RAID.
● Media Type — Select the media type for the disk pool: Hard Disk Drives (HDD) or Solid State Disks (SSD). HDDs use
traditional rotational magnetic media for data storage and SSDs implement flash memory for data storage.
● Disk Boot Size — Select one of the following disk block sizes:
○ 512 — indicates that the 512 bytes block size hard drives (HDD) are selected.
○ 4K — indicates that the 4K block size hard disk drives (HDD) are selected. 4K block HDDs allows the faster data transfer
with fewer commands.
● T10 Protection Information (T10 PI) Capability— It is known as DIF (Data Integrity Fields) and the supporting HDDs are
referred to DIF drives. The T10 enabled HDDs validates and stores the data integrity fields for each blocks. It performs this
action when you write the data on the disk and return these values on a read request. When you read or write the data from
the HDD, the data is checked for the errors. Select one of the following types of T10 protection information capabilities :
○ All — indicates that both the T10 PI capable and non-capable HDDs are selected.
○ T10 PI Capable — indicates that only T10 PI capable HDDs are selected.
○ Non-T10 Capable — indicates that only non-T10 capable HDDs are selected.
NOTE: PERC 9 with version 9.3.2 and above doesn’t support T10 PI capabilities.
● Encryption Capability — Select Yes to enable encryption capability.
● Select Span Length — Select the span length. The span length value refers to the number of physical disk drives included
in each span. Span length applies only to RAID 10, RAID 50, and RAID 60. The Select Span Length drop‑down list is active
only if you have selected RAID 10, RAID 50, or RAID 60.
● Drives remaining for current span — Displays the number of physical disk-drives remaining in the current span based on
the span length value selected.
● Select the physical disk-drives using the check boxes at the bottom of the screen. The physical disk-drive selection must
meet the requirements of the RAID level and span length. To select all the physical disk-drives, click Select All. After you
select the option, the option changes to Deselect.
Setting virtual disk attributes
Use this page to specify the values for the following virtual drive attributes:
● Size — Specify the size of the virtual drive.
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