Users Guide

1. Turn off the power to the system, physical disks, enclosures, and system components.

2. Disconnect power cables from the system.

3. Move the physical disks to desired positions on the backplane or the enclosure.

4. Perform a safety check. Make sure the physical disks are inserted properly.

5. Turn on the system.

The controller detects the RAID configuration from the configuration data on the physical disks.

Enhanced HBA mode

Enhanced HBA mode (eHBA mode) is a new operating mode available with H740P, H745, and H745P MX cards. eHBA provides

the following features:

● Create virtual disks with RAID level 0, 1, or 10.

● Present Non-RAID disks to the host.

● Configure a default cache policy for virtual disks. The starting default is write-back with read ahead.

● Configure virtual disks and Non-RAID disks as valid boot devices

● Automatically convert all unconfigured disks to Non-RAID:

○ On system boot

○ On controller reset

○ When unconfigured disks are hot-inserted

NOTE: Creating or Importing RAID 5, 6, 50, or 60 virtual disks are not supported in enhanced HBA mode.

NOTE: Older versions of OpenManage Storage Management and Comprehensive Embedded Management do not support

management of the controller in enhanced HBA mode.

NOTE: In enhanced HBA mode, non-RAID disks are enumerated first in ascending order, while RAID volumes are

enumerated in descending order. For more information, see the applicable systems management documentation.

Table 2. PERC cards with eHBA mode enabled

Feature eHBA mode (H740P, H745, and H745P MX only)

RAID levels 0, 1, and 10

Host I/O command queue depth 5120 (H740P)

Maximum supported PDs Max (240)

4KB drives Yes

Write back caching Yes (VDs only)

SED support Yes, local key management

Battery maintenance Yes

Patrol read Yes (VDs only)

Controller and battery diagnostics Yes

FastPath

FastPath is a feature that improves application performance by delivering high I/O per second (IOPs) for solid state drives

(SSD). The Dell PERC 10 series supports FastPath.

To enable FastPath on a virtual disk, the cache policies of the RAID controller must be set to write-through and no read ahead.

This enables FastPath to use the proper data path through the controller based on command (read/write), I/O size, and RAID

type.

Features