Users Guide

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), Serial ATA (SATA), or NVM Express
(NVMe). SAS drives are used for high performance, while SATA drives are used for 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 allow 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 block. 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.
● Encryption Protocol — Select the type of encryption protocol. Select one of the following types of encryption protocol
type:
○ TCG Enterprise SSC — indicates only TCG Enterprise SSC Capable drives are selected.
○ TCG Opal SSC — indicates only TCG Opal SSC Capable drives are selected.
○ Non-Encryption Capable — indicates only non-encryption capable drives are selected.
● 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 — Setting span length is
only supported in RAID 10, RAID 50, and RAID 60. And in a RAID 10 configuration, the default value is set to 2 and the option
Span Length is not available is the storage controller supports Uneven span.
● 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.
● Stripe Element Size — Select the stripe element size. The stripe element size is the amount of drive space a stripe
consumes on each physical-disk drive in the stripe. The Stripe Element Size list may contain more options than initially
displayed on the screen. Use the up arrow and down arrow keys to view all available options.
● Read Policy — Select the read policy:
○ Read Ahead — The controller reads sequential sectors of the virtual drives when seeking data. The Read Ahead policy
may improve system performance if the data is written to sequential sectors of the virtual drives.
○ No Read Ahead — The controller does not use the Read Ahead policy. The No Read Ahead policy may improve system
performance, if the data is random and not written to sequential sectors.
○ Adaptive Read Ahead — The controller initiates the Read Ahead policy only if the most-recently-read requests
accessed sequential sectors of the disk drive. If the most-recently-read requests access random sectors of the disk
drive, then the controller uses the No Read Ahead policy.
● Write Policy — Select the write policy.
○ Write Through — The controller sends a write-request-completion signal only after the data is written to the disk drive.
The Write Through policy provides better data security than the Write Back policy, because the system assumes that the
data is available only after it has been written to the disk drive.
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Configure