Users Guide

• RAID 6 — Stripes data across the physical disks, and uses two sets of parity information for additional data redundancy. If one or two
physical disks fail, the data can be rebuilt using the parity information. RAID 6 offers good data redundancy and read performance but
slower write performance.
• RAID 10 — Combines mirrored physical disks with data striping. If a physical disk fails, data can be rebuilt using the mirrored data.
RAID 10 offers good read and write performance with good data redundancy.
• RAID 50 — A dual-level array that uses multiple RAID 5 sets in a single array. A single physical disk failure can occur in each of the
RAID 5 without any loss of data on the entire array. Although the RAID 50 has increased write performance, its performance
decreases, data or program access gets slower, and transfer speeds on the array are affected when a physical disk fails and
reconstruction takes place.
• RAID 60 — Combines the straight block level striping of RAID 0 with the distributed double parity of RAID 6. The system must have
at least eight physical disks to use RAID 60. Failures while a single physical disk is rebuilding in one RAID 60 set do not lead to data loss.
RAID 60 has improved fault tolerance because more than two physical disks on either span must fail for data loss to occur.
NOTE: Depending on the type of controllers, some RAID levels are not supported.
Minimum disk requirement for different RAID levels
Table 11. RAID level and number of disks
RAID Level Minimum number of Disks
0 1*
1 2
5 3
6 4
10 4
50 6
60 8
* For PERC S110, S130, and S140 RAID controllers, a minimum of two hard-disk drives are required.
Selecting physical disks
Use the Select Physical Disks screen to select the physical disks to be used for the virtual drive and select the physical disk drive-
related properties.
The number of physical disks required for the virtual disk varies depending on the RAID level. The minimum and maximum numbers of
physical disks required for the RAID level are displayed on the screen.
• Protocol — Select the protocol for the disk pool: Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Serial ATA (SATA), or NVM Express (NVMe).
SAS drives are used for high performance, while SATA drives are used for a more cost-effective solution. A disk pool is a logical
grouping of physical disk drives on which one or more virtual drives can be created. The protocol is the type of technology used to
implement RAID.
• Media Type — Select the media type for the disk pool: Hard Disk Drives (HDD) or Solid State Disks (SSD). HDDs use traditional
rotational magnetic media for data storage and SSDs implement flash memory for data storage.
• Disk Boot Size — Select one of the following disk block sizes:
• 512 — indicates that the 512 bytes block size hard drives (HDD) are selected.
• 4K — indicates that the 4K block size hard disk drives (HDD) are selected. 4K block HDDs allow the faster data transfer with
fewer commands.
• T10 Protection Information (T10 PI) Capability— It is known as DIF (Data Integrity Fields) and the supporting HDDs are referred
to DIF drives. The T10 enabled HDDs validates and stores the data integrity fields for each block. It performs this action when you
write the data on the disk and return these values on a read request. When you read or write the data from the HDD, the data is
checked for the errors. Select one of the following types of T10 protection information capabilities:
• All — indicates that both the T10 PI capable and non-capable HDDs are selected.
• T10 PI Capable — indicates that only T10 PI capable HDDs are selected.
• Non-T10 Capable — indicates that only non-T10 capable HDDs are selected.
Configure
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