Users guide

Intel® RAID Software User Guide 52
6.2.1 Mirrored Volume Configuration Overview
The Intel SAS3 BIOS CU is a menu-driven utility program that enables you to easily
configure and manage Integrated RAID volumes. You can use the SAS3 BIOS CU to
create one or two mirrored volumes on each Intel SAS-3 controller, with up to two
optional global hot spare disks. You must connect all disks in a mirrored volume to the
same Intel SAS-3 controller.
Although you can use disks of different sizes in mirrored volumes, the smallest disk in the
volume determines the logical size of all disks in the volume. In other words, the volume
does not use the excess space of the higher-capacity member disks. For example, if you
create an Integrated Mirroring Enhanced volume with two 100-GB disks and two 120-GB
disks, the volume uses only 100 GB on each of the 120-GB disks.
See 6.1.1, Integrated Mirroring and Integrated Mirroring Enhanced Features for more
information about the features of Integrated Mirroring, Integrated Mirroring + Striping,
and Integrated Mirroring Enhanced volumes.
6.2.2 Creating Mirrored Volumes
The SAS3 BIOS CU is part of the Fusion-MPT BIOS. When the BIOS loads during the
startup sequence and you see the message about the Intel Configuration Utility, press Ctrl-
C to start the SAS3 BIOS CU. When you start the SAS3 BIOS CU, the message changes
to the following:
Please wait, invoking SAS Configuration Utility...
After a brief pause, the main menu (Adapter List window) of the SAS3 BIOS CU appears.
On some systems, however, the following message appears next:
Intel Corp Configuration Utility will load following
initialization!
In this case, the SAS3 BIOS CU loads after the system completes its power-on self-test.
You can configure one or two Integrated Mirroring, Integrated Mirroring + Striping, and
Integrated Mirroring Enhanced volumes on each Intel SAS-3 controller. Alternatively,
you can configure one mirrored volume and one Integrated Striping volume on the same
controller, up to a maximum of 14 disk drives for the two volumes. (The maximum
number includes one or two optional hot spare disks for the mirrored volume or volumes.)
Additional information about configuring a RAID volume follows:
• All physical disks in a volume must be either SATA (with extended command set
support) or SAS (with SMART support). You cannot combine SAS and SATA disks
in the same volume. However, you can create one volume with SAS disks and a
second volume with SATA disks on the same controller.
• Disks in the volume must have 512-byte blocks and must not have removable
media.
• Integrated Mirroring volumes must have two disks, Integrated Mirroring Enhanced
volumes contain three disks to ten disks, and Integrated Mirroring + Striping
volumes can have four, six, eight, or ten disks.