Users Guide

Controllers

This chapter provides information about the supported controllers and controller features in Storage Management.

Related concepts

RAID Controller Technology: SATA And SAS

Which Controllers Do I Have?

Non-RAID Controller Description

Topics:

• What Is A Controller?

• RAID Controller Technology: SATA And SAS

• RAID Controller Features

• Controller — Supported RAID Levels

• Controller — Supported Stripe Sizes

• RAID Controller Read, Write, Cache, And Disk Cache Policy

• Background Initialization On PERC Controllers

• Non-RAID Controller Description

• Firmware Or Driver Versions

• Controller Health

• Controllers Properties And Tasks

• Controller Tasks

• Viewing Available Reports

What Is A Controller?

Most operating systems do not read and write data directly from the disks, but instead send read and write instructions to a controller.

The controller is the hardware in your system that interacts directly with the disks to write and retrieve data. A controller has connectors

(channels or ports) which are attached to one or more physical disks or an enclosure containing physical disks. RAID controllers can span

the boundaries of the disks to create an extended amount of storage space — or a virtual disk — using the capacity of more than one

disk.

Controllers also perform other tasks, such as initiating rebuilds, initializing disks, and more. To complete their tasks, controllers require

special software known as firmware and drivers. In order to function properly, the controller must have the minimum required version of

the firmware and drivers installed.

Storage Management supports different types of controllers. If your system has a supported controller, the controller is displayed by

expanding the Storage object in the System tree view in the GUI. You can select the controller to display tabs for executing controller

tasks and viewing controller properties.

Different controllers have different characteristics in the way they read and write data and execute tasks. It is helpful to understand these

features to most efficiently manage the storage. The following sections describe the supported controllers and their features.

RAID Controller Technology: SATA And SAS

Storage Management supports RAID controllers using SATA and SAS technology. This section indicates which technology the supported

RAID controllers use. For more information on these controllers, see Supported Features and the controller hardware documentation.

SAS RAID Controllers

The following RAID controllers use Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) technology.

• PERC 6/E

46 Controllers