User's Manual

– Read Ahead — The controller reads sequential sectors of the virtual drives when seeking data. The

Read Ahead policy may improve system performance if the data is written to sequential sectors of the

virtual drives.

– No Read Ahead — The controller does not use the Read Ahead policy. The No Read Ahead policy may

improve system performance, if the data is random and not written to sequential sectors.

– Adaptive Read Ahead — The controller initiates the Read Ahead policy only if the most-recently-read

requests accessed sequential sectors of the disk drive. If the most-recently-read requests accesses

random sectors of the disk drive, then the controller uses the No Read Ahead policy.

• Write Policy — Select the write policy.

– Write Through — The controller sends a write-request-completion signal only after the data is written to

the disk drive. The Write Through policy provides better data security than the Write Back policy,

because the system assumes the data is available only after it has been written to the disk drive.

– Write Back — The controller sends a write-request completion signal as soon as the data is in the

controller cache, but has not yet been written to disk drive. The Write Back policy may provide faster

'write' performance, but it also provides less data security, because a system failure can prevent the

data from being written to disk drive.

– Force Write Back — The write cache is enabled regardless of whether or not the controller has an

operational battery. If the controller does not have an operational battery, data loss may occur in the

event of a power failure.

• Assign a Hot Spare Disk if available — Select this option to assign a hot spare to the virtual drive.

A hot spare is an unused backup physical disk drive that is used to rebuild data from a redundant virtual drive. A

hot spare can be used only with a redundant RAID level. Hot spares also have requirements for physical disk

drive size. The hot spare must be as big as or bigger than the smallest physical disk drive included in the virtual

drive. If the RAID level and physical disk drive availability do not meet these requirements, a hot spare is not

assigned.

• Hot Spare Disk — Select a disk that will be used as a hot spare. Only one dedicated hot spare is supported in

Lifecycle Controller.

• Secure Virtual Disk — Select the option to secure the virtual drive using the controller’s security key.

NOTE: The secure virtual drive is created only if the controller security key is created and the selected

disks are Self-Encrypting Drives (SEDs).

Viewing Summary

The Summary page displays the virtual disk attributes based on the selections.

CAUTION: Clicking Finish deletes all existing virtual drives except any foreign configurations that you specified. All

data residing on the virtual drives is lost.

To return to a previous page to review or change selections, click Back. To exit the Wizard without making changes,

click Cancel.

Click Finish to create a virtual drive with the displayed attributes.

Configuring RAID Using Software RAID

For the S110 controller, make sure to change the SATA Controller option to RAID Mode. To do this through BIOS, the

latest BIOS version must be installed. For more information on the BIOS versions for different systems, see

Lifecycle

Controller Readme

NOTE: If you have an older BIOS, you can configure RAID only through Option ROM.

Use this feature to configure RAID if a PERC S110 controller on the motherboard is present in the system. If the software

RAID option is selected, Lifecycle Controller displays the physical disk drives as Non-RAID disks or RAID-ready disks.