Owner's Manual

B-16
LSI SAS RAID ▍
MS-96E0
LSI SAS RAID ▍
MS-96E0
4. inteGrated StripinG overview
This section provides an overview of the LSI Logic Integrated Striping (IS) feature.
4�1 Introduction
The LSI Logic Integrated Striping (IS) feature is useful for applications that require the
faster performance and increased storage capacity of striping. The low-cost IS feature
has many of the advantages of a more expensive RAID striping solution. A single IS
logical drive may be congured as the boot disk or as a data disk.
The IS feature is implemented with controller rmware that supports the Fusion-MPT In-
terface. IS provides better performance and more capacity than individual disks, without
burdening the host CPU. The rmware splits host I/Os over multiple disks and presents
the disks as a single logical drive. In general, striping is transparent to the BIOS, the
drivers, and the operating system.
The SAS BIOS CU is used to congure IS volumes, which can consist of two to eight
disks.
Note: Integrated Mirroring and Integrated Striping volumes can be congured on
the same LSI logic SAS controller.
4�2 IS Features
Integrated Striping supports the following features:
Support for volumes with two to eight drives
Support for two IS volumes, with up to 10 drives total, on a controller. An IS volume
can also be combined with an IM or IME volume. Note: Currently available LSI
Logic SAS controllers support a maximum of eight drives. All drives in a volume
must be connected to the same SAS controller.
Presents a single virtual drive to the OS for each congured volume
Support for both SAS and SATA drives, although the two types of drives cannot be
combined in one volume
Fusion-MPT architecture
Easy-to-use SAS BIOS conguration utility
Error notication
Use of metadata to store volume conguration on disks
OS-specic event log
Error display inside the Fusion-MPT BIOS
SES status LED support for drives used in IS volumes
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■