Users Guide

Features

The BOSS-S1 card supports the following features:

Topics:

• Foreign import

• SMART info

• Auto-rebuild

• Non-RAID disk support

• TRIM

• Quick initialization

• Erase physical disk

Foreign import

A virtual disk is considered foreign if it is not native to the adapter.

● A virtual disk is considered native to the adapter if:

○ the virtual disk was created or imported on the adapter.

● A physical disk is considered native to the adapter if:

○ There is no previous virtual disk metadata on the adapter and the physical disk are unconfigured.

○ When the virtual disk corresponding to the physical disks is deleted

The system must be rebooted after performing foreign import.

To check for previous virtual disk metadata, see Controller Information. Only a virtual disk or physical disk native to the adapter

will be presented to the operating system.

Upon migrating two foreign drives to a controller, you must do either of the following:

● Clear the controller configuration if using unconfigured drives — Clear Controller Configuration.

● Import the virtual disk if using configured drives — Virtual Disk Import.

SMART info

SMART monitors certain physical aspects of the disk electronics to help detect predictable disk failures. Data on SMART-

compliant physical disks can be monitored to identify changes in values and determine whether the values are within the

threshold limits. Any electrical failures in the disk can cause degradation in the performance before failure.

A SMART failure is also referred to as a predicted failure. There are numerous factors that predict physical disk failures, such as

a read error rate, throughput performance, and changes in spin-up time. In addition, there are factors related to read/write

surface failure, such as seek error rate and excessive bad blocks.

NOTE: The BOSS-S1 CLI displays error messages with the status OK and NOT OK along with smart attributes.

Auto-rebuild

A virtual disk rebuild will begin on system boot automatically if the native virtual disk is degraded and a valid rebuild target is

present. A valid rebuild target is any functional drive attached to the BOSS-S1 device which is not part of the native virtual disk

and is of equal or greater storage capacity. An auto-rebuild occurs without prompting the user, and any data on the rebuild

target is overwritten.

12 Features