User manual
INTRODUCTION
11
chips, which can simultaneously communicate with the I/O proces-
sor and read or write data on multiple drives.
Unsurpassed Data Availability
As storage capacity requirements continue to rapidly increase, us-
ers require greater levels of disk drive fault tolerance, which can be
implemented without doubling the investment in disk drives. RAID
1 (mirroring) provides high fault tolerance. However, half of the
drive capacity of the array is lost to mirroring, making it too costly
for most users to implement on large volume sets due to doubling
the number of drives required. Users want the protection of RAID 1
or better with an implementation cost comparable to RAID 5. RAID
6 can offer fault tolerance greater than RAID 1 or RAID 5 but only
consumes the capacity of 2 disk drives for distributed parity data.
The 8/12/16/24-port RAID controllers provide RAID 6 functionality
to meet these demanding requirements.
The SATA RAID controllers also provide RAID levels 0, 1, 10, 3, 5,
6, Single Disk or JBOD congurations. Its high data availability and
protection is derived from the following capabilities: Online RAID
Capacity Expansion, Array Roaming, Online RAID Level / Stripe
Size Migration, Dynamic Volume Set Expansion, Global Online
Spare, Automatic Drive Failure Detection, Automatic Failed Drive
Rebuilding, Disk Hot-Swap, Online Background Rebuilding and
Instant Availability/Background Initialization. During the controller
rmware ash upgrade process, it is possible that an error results
in corruption of the controller rmware. This could result in the de-
vice becoming non-functional. However, with our Redundant Flash
image feature, the controller will revert back to the last known
version of rmware and continue operating. This reduces the risk of
system failure due to rmware crashes.
Easy RAID Management
The SATA RAID controller utilizes built-in rmware with an embed-
ded terminal emulation that can access via hot key at M/B BIOS
boot-up screen. This pre-boot manager utility can be used to sim-
plify the setup and management of the RAID controller. The con-
troller rmware also contains a web browser-based program that