Users Guide

Contents
1 Overview........................................................................................................................................................9
Supported operating systems......................................................................................................................................... 13
PERC card specications................................................................................................................................................ 14
Management applications for PERC cards....................................................................................................................15
Comprehensive embedded management ...............................................................................................................15
Dell OpenManage Storage Management................................................................................................................ 15
Related documentation....................................................................................................................................................16
2 Getting started with your PERC card........................................................................................................... 17
Installing the operating system and the PERC card on a base system...................................................................... 17
Installing the PERC card on a system with the operating system pre-installed....................................................... 18
Installing the operating system on a system with the PERC card pre-installed....................................................... 19
Setting up the system with the PERC card and the operating system pre-installed .............................................20
Conguring settings of a replaced PERC card on a system with operating system pre-installed.........................20
3 Features.......................................................................................................................................................22
Enhanced rebuild prioritization....................................................................................................................................... 22
Redundant path support for PERC H830.....................................................................................................................22
Setting up redundant path support on the PERC H830 adapter........................................................................ 23
Reverting to single path support from redundant path support for PERC H830..............................................24
240 virtual disk support for H830.................................................................................................................................. 24
PERC 9 personality management..................................................................................................................................25
Secure rmware update..................................................................................................................................................25
Improved RAID 10 conguration.....................................................................................................................................25
4 KB sector disk drives....................................................................................................................................................25
Physical disk power management..................................................................................................................................25
Congured spin down delay......................................................................................................................................26
Types of virtual disk initialization.................................................................................................................................... 26
Full initialization...........................................................................................................................................................26
Fast initialization.........................................................................................................................................................26
Background initialization..................................................................................................................................................27
Consistency checks......................................................................................................................................................... 27
Disk roaming......................................................................................................................................................................27
Using disk roaming..................................................................................................................................................... 27
FastPath............................................................................................................................................................................28
Conguring FastPath-capable virtual disks............................................................................................................ 28
Virtual disk migration....................................................................................................................................................... 28
Migrating virtual disks................................................................................................................................................29
Virtual disk write cache policies..................................................................................................................................... 29
Conditions under which write-back is employed................................................................................................... 30
Conditions under which forced write-back with no battery is employed........................................................... 30
Virtual disk read cache policies.......................................................................................................................................30
Contents
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