® Intel RAID Controllers Best Practices White Paper Revision 1.
Intel® RAID Controllers Best Practices White Paper Revision History Date April, 2008 Revision Number 1.0 Modifications Initial release. Disclaimers Information in this document is provided in connection with Intel® products. No license, express or implied, by estoppel or otherwise, to any intellectual property rights is granted by this document.
Intel® RAID Controllers Best Practices White Paper Table of Contents 1. Overview ............................................................................................................................... 5 2. Installing and Configuring Intel® RAID Controllers........................................................... 5 2.1 Installing Intel® RAID Controllers ............................................................................. 5 2.2 Configuring a RAID Array ...............................
Intel® RAID Controllers Best Practices White Paper iv Revision 1.
Intel® RAID Controllers Best Practices White Paper 1. Overview RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) technology has been commonly implemented in server usage models as an option to provide additional data protection. RAID solutions are now also found in other computer environments such as desktops, workstations, and external storage devices which support a large number of hard drives. Intel is committed to providing customers with stable, high-performance, and high-reliability RAID products.
Intel® RAID Controllers Best Practices White Paper A backup plan should be an integral part of a healthy data security system. Computers and computer components can and do fail. Multiple disk failures in RAID configurations, data center catastrophes (no matter how small) and virus infections can take down a system and corrupt critical data. Often there is no warning before a failure, and then it is too late.
Intel® RAID Controllers Best Practices White Paper The following table provides a quick reference for RAID settings. The information is simplified and may not be accurate with some applications or tests. For detailed performance tuning information please refer to the Intel® RAID Controller Performance Optimization whitepaper, available at http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/.
Intel® RAID Controllers Best Practices White Paper 5. When to Use a RAID Controller Battery A RAID controller battery should be used whenever virtual drive write-back cache is enabled and data is mission critical. Cache-to-cache I/O is much faster than any other type of I/O operation occurring on the data bus.
Intel® RAID Controllers Best Practices White Paper 7. Enterprise-class versus Desktop-class Drives Enterprise class hard drives should always be used on an enterprise class system. Use of a desktop class drive is not recommended due to I/O timeout incompatibilities, lower tolerances for vibration, and a lack of end-to-end data error detection and correction. Hard drive manufacturers develop drives to meet specific customer requirements for reliability, capacity, performance and power consumption.
Intel® RAID Controllers Best Practices White Paper RAID set rebuilds are executed for true drive failures. Error recovery is usually not offered on desktop drives due to the cost. A desktop drive often responds too slowly to preserve the RAID and the drive is flagged for replacement. The RAID set then operates in a slower degraded mode until the drive is replaced. Complete loss of data is possible if another drive times out while the drive is in a degraded mode.
Intel® RAID Controllers Best Practices White Paper 8. Basic Troubleshooting Some basic troubleshooting information is provided below for your reference. Note: Before attempting to diagnosis RAID failures or make any changes to the RAID configuration, please confirm that a complete and verified backup of critical data is available. A verified backup exists when the backed up data has been compared against the original data.
Intel® RAID Controllers Best Practices White Paper 8.3 8.3.1 8.3.2 9. Partially Degraded – A virtual disk with a RAID level capable of sustaining more than one member drive failure experiences a member failure but the virtual disk is not degraded or offline. Degraded – A virtual disk that already has one or more member drive failures and cannot sustain a subsequent drive failure.
