Users Guide

Instant secure erase

Instant secure erase (ISE) drives use the same encryption technology as SED drives but do not allow the encryption key to be

secured. The encryption technology allows the drive to be re-purposed and securely erased using the cryptographic erase

function.

NOTE: ISE drives do not provide protection against theft.

4 KB sector disk drives

PERC 10 controllers support 4 KB sector disk drives, which enables you to efficiently use the storage space.

Before installing Windows on 4 KB sector disk drives, refer to Windows operating system installation errors.

NOTE: Mixing 512–byte native and 512–byte emulated drives in a virtual disk is allowed, but mixing 512–byte and 4 KB

native drives in a virtual disk is not allowed.

NOTE: 4 K is only supported in UEFI mode and not legacy BIOS.

NOTE: 4 K devices do not appear in the boot select option. For more information, see Enable boot support.

Fault tolerance

The PERC 10 series supports the following:

● Self-monitoring and reporting technology (SMART)

● Patrol read

● Physical disk failure detection

● Physical disk rebuild using hot spares

● Controller cache preservation

● Battery and non-volatile cache backup of controller cache to protect data

● Detection of batteries with low charge after boot up

The next sections describe some methods to achieve fault tolerance.

The SMART feature

The SMART feature monitors certain physical aspects of all motors, heads, and physical disk electronics to help detect

predictable physical disk failures. Data on SMART-compliant physical disks can be monitored to identify changes in values and

determine whether the values are within threshold limits. Many mechanical and electrical failures display some degradation in

performance before failure.

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

such as a bearing failure, a broken read/write head, and changes in spin-up rate. In addition, there are factors related to read/

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

NOTE:

For detailed information on SCSI interface specifications, see t10.org and for detailed information on SATA interface

specifications, see t13.org.

Automatic Replace Member with predicted failure

A replace member operation can occur when there is a SMART predictive failure reporting on a physical disk in a virtual disk.

The automatic replace member is initiated when the first SMART error occurs on a physical disk that is part of a virtual disk. The

target disk needs to be a hot spare that qualifies as a rebuild disk. The physical disk with the SMART error is marked as failed

only after the successful completion of the replace member. This prevents the array from reaching degraded state.

If an automatic replace member occurs using a source disk that was originally a hot spare (that was used in a rebuild), and a new

disk is added and set as a target disk for the replace member operation, the hot spare drive will revert to the hot spare state

after the replace member operation successfully completes.

Features