Users guide

Intel® RAID Software User Guide 62
6.3.1 Integrated Striping Configuration Overview
The Intel SAS3 BIOS CU is a menu-driven utility program that enables you to easily
configure and manage Integrated RAID volumes. Use the SAS3 BIOS CU to create one or
two Integrated Striping volumes on each Intel SAS-3 controller. Each volume contains
two drives to ten drives. All disks in an Integrated Striping volume must be connected to
the same Intel SAS-3 controller.
Although you can use disks of different sizes in Integrated Striping volumes, the smallest
disk in the volume determines the logical size of all disks in the volume. In other words,
the firmware does not use the excess space of the higher-capacity member disks. For
example, if you create an Integrated Striping volume with two 100-GB disks and two 120-
GB disks, the firmware uses only 100 GB on each of the 120-GB disks for the volume.
The supported stripe size is 64 KB.
See 6.1.2, Integrated Striping Features for more information about Integrated Striping
volumes.
6.3.2 Creating Integrated Striping Volumes
The SAS3 BIOS CU is part of the Fusion-MPT BIOS. When the BIOS loads during boot
and you see the message about the Intel Configuration Utility, press Ctrl-C to start the
SAS3 BIOS CU. After 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 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.
Each Intel controller can support one or two Integrated RAID volumes. The volumes can
include two Integrated Striping (RAID 0) volumes, two mirrored volumes, or one volume
of each type. The two volumes can have a maximum of 14 disk drives. (This configuration
includes one or two hot spare disks for mirrored volumes.)
The following guidelines apply when creating an Integrated Striping volume:
• All physical disks in the 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, it is possible to configure one volume with SAS disks
and one volume with SATA disks on the same controller.
• Disks in the volume must have 512-byte blocks and must not have removable
media.
• Integrated Striping volumes must have at least 2 disks and no more than 10 disks.
Integrated Striping volumes do not support hot spare disks.