User guide

LSI Corporation
- 10 -
12Gb/s MegaRAID SAS RAID Controllers User Guide
October 2013
Chapter 1: Overview
Summary of 12Gb/s MegaRAID SATA+SAS RAID Controller Characteristics
 They support wide ports that consist of two, three, or four PHYs within a single quad port.
 They support narrow ports consisting of a single PHY.
 They transfer data by using SCSI information units.
1.6.2 SAS Array Limitations
This section describes the array limitations of the 12Gb/s MegaRAID SATA+SAS RAID controllers. These limitations
include the number of drives supported per controller, the maximum number of drives per controller, and the
maximum number of virtual drives allowed per controller.
The following table lists the array limitations for the 12Gb/s MegaRAID SATA+SAS RAID controllers.
These RAID controllers support 64-bit logical block addressing (LBA), which makes it possible to connect a large
number of drives to the RAID controller, directly and through expanders. However, the actual number of drives that
you can attach depends on the limits listed in this table rather than by actual RAID volume capacity.
1.6.3 SATA III Features
The following list describes the SATA III features of the RAID controllers:
 They support SATA III data transfers of 6Gb/s.
 They support STP data transfers of 6Gb/s and 3Gb/s.
 They provide a serial, point-to-point storage interface.
 They simplify cabling between devices.
 They eliminate the master-slave construction used in parallel ATA.
 They permit addressing of multiple SATA targets through an expander.
 They permit multiple initiators to address a single target (in a fail-over configuration) through an expander.
 They comply with the Serial ATA specification, version 3.0.
1.6.4 PCI Express Performance
The following list describes the PCIe performance features of the RAID controllers:
 They provide a PCIe interface that does the following:
— Supports a dedicated PCIe bus.
— Supports x8 lane configuration.
Table 1 12Gb/s MegaRAID SATA+SAS RAID Controllers Array Limitations
Specification
MegaRAID SAS 9341-4i Controller
MegaRAID SAS 9341-8i Controller
MegaRAID SAS 9361-4i Controller
MegaRAID SAS 9361-8i Controller
Maximum virtual drives per controller 32 64
Maximum drive groups per controller 32 128
Maximum virtual drives per drive group 16 16
Maximum drives per drive group 32 32
Maximum drives per controller 64 (32 configurable drives) 240
Maximum hot spares per controller 32 240
Maximum spans per virtual drive 8 8
Maximum enclosures 2 32