HP Smart Array 6400 Series Controllers Support Guide, September 2007

1 Smart Array 6400 Series Controller Overview
This chapter provides an overview of RAID technology and descriptions of the different RAID
levels that are supported by the HP Smart Array 6400 Series Controllers. This chapter addresses
the following topics:
“6402 and 6404 Controller Features” (page 15)
“Board Components and Features” (page 16)
“Fault Management Features” (page 20)
“Fault Management in Supported RAID Configurations” (page 21)
“Choosing a RAID Method” (page 21)
6402 and 6404 Controller Features
The key features of the Smart Array 6402 and 6404 controllers are as follows:
• Two Ultra320 SCSI channels, supporting up to 28 disk drives (2 channels, 14 drives per
channel)
• Support for the HP-UX 11i v2 operating system
• Backward compatibility with Ultra160 and Ultra2 devices
• 3.3-v, 64-bit, 133-MHz PCI-X (or 66 MHz PCI) system interface
• RAID 0 (striping)
• RAID 1, 1+0, 5, and ADG (fault tolerant)
• HP-UX Virtual Partitions (vPars)
• Ignite-UX
• Hot-pluggable disk drives
• Drive movement
• Adjustable stripe size
• S.M.A.R.T. disk drives
• Multiple online spares per array
• Background initialization
• Domain validation
Table 1-1 Smart Array Controller Comparisons
Maximum Number of
Supported Drives
Cache (read/write)SCSI
(external/internal)
Channels
281282/22Smart Array 6402
562564/24Smart Array 6404
6402 and 6404 Controller Features 15