Users Guide
Table Of Contents
- Dell EMC PowerEdge RAID Controller S150 User’s Guide
- Overview
- Physical Disks
- Virtual Disks
- Cabling the drives for the S150
- BIOS Configuration Utility
- Entering the BIOS configuration utility
- Exiting the BIOS Configuration Utility
- Initializing the physical disks
- Creating the virtual disks
- Deleting the virtual disks
- Swapping two virtual disks
- Managing the hot spare disks
- Viewing the physical disks details
- Viewing the virtual disks details
- Rescan disks
- Controller Options
- Continue to boot
- UEFI RAID configuration utility
- Installing the drivers
- Troubleshooting your system
- Precautions for hot removal or hot insertion of NVMe drives
- Unable to configure Linux RAID using UEFI Configuration Utility
- Performance degradation after disabling SATA physical disk write cache policy
- Unable to modify any feature settings in UEFI or OPROM
- Extra reboot during OS installation
- OS installation failing on NVMe PCIe SSD with third-party driver
- Server performance is slow and crashes during OS installation on the SATA configuration
- Server performance is slow during OS installation on the NVMe configuration
- System startup issues
- System does not boot
- Controller mode is set incorrectly at System Setup
- Boot mode, boot sequence, and or boot sequence retry are set incorrectly
- Bootable virtual disk is in a failed state
- The boot order is incorrect for a bootable virtual disk
- A Non-RAID virtual disk is no longer in first position in the BIOS configuration utility list after a system reboot
- The BIOS configuration utility option does not display
- Configuring RAID using the Option ROM Utility is disabled
- Warning Messages
- Other errors appearing on the BIOS screen
- BSOD is observed while booting on the NVMe configuration server
- S150 controller lists M.2 drives
- Error in displaying the CD/DVD-ROM while in legacy mode
- Unavailable error under UEFI boot settings
- S150 does not display greater than ten virtual disks in the BIOS Configuration Utility or CTRL R
- Unable to delete virtual disks when there are more than 30 virtual disks present in the system
- Virtual disk rebuild status in the BIOS Configuration Utility (
) or in UEFI HII
- Physical disk - related errors
- The physical disk fails
- Cannot initialize a physical disk
- Status LED is not working
- Cannot update NVMe PCIe SSD firmware by using Dell Update Package or DUP
- NVMe drive error when inserted for the first time
- Third-party driver installation for NVMe PCIe SSD failing
- Unable to find the NVMe PCIe SSD for operating system installation
- Virtual disks - related errors
- Stale partitions are listed on creating a virtual disk for Linux
- Rebuilding a virtual disk the global hot spare is not listed as online in HII or iDRAC
- S150 displays 22 virtual disks on POST instead of 30 virtual disks
- S150 displays 43 virtual disks on POST instead of 30 virtual disks
- Display of failed virtual disk in HII
- Virtual disk size in decimals is not supported while creating a VD
- Cannot create a virtual disk
- A virtual disk is in a degraded state
- Cannot assign a dedicated hot spare to a virtual disk
- Cannot create a global hot spare
- A dedicated hot spare fails
- Failed or degraded virtual disk
- Cannot create a virtual disk on selected physical disks
- RAID disk created from the NVMe PCIe SSDs not appearing in operating system environment, showing as partitioned disks
- Cannot perform an Online Capacity Expansion or Reconfigure on a virtual disk
- Unable to configure RAID on NVMe PCIe SSD using a third party RAID configuration utility
- Getting help
Mirror rebuilding
A RAID mirror configuration can be rebuilt after a new physical disk is inserted and the physical disk is designated as a hot spare.
NOTE: The system does not have to be rebooted.
Fault tolerance
The following fault tolerance features are available with the PERC S150:
● Physical disk failure detection (automatic).
● Virtual disk rebuild using hot spares (automatic, if the hot spare is configured for this feature).
● Parity generation and checking (RAID 5 only).
● Hot-swap manual replacement of a physical disk without rebooting the system (only for systems with a backplane that
allows hot-swapping).
If one side of a RAID 1 (mirror) fails, data can be rebuilt by using the physical disk on the other side of the mirror.
If a physical disk in RAID 5 fails, parity data exists on the remaining physical disks, which can be used to restore the data to a
new replacement physical disk configured as a hot spare.
If a physical disk fails in RAID 10, the virtual disk remains functional and data is read from the surviving mirrored physical disk(s).
A single disk failure in each mirrored set can be sustained, depending on how the mirrored set fails.
Self-Monitoring And Reporting Technology
The Self-Monitoring and Reporting Technology (SMART) feature monitors certain physical aspects of all motors, heads, and
physical disk electronics to help detect predictable physical disk failures. Data on SMART compliant physical disks can be
monitored to identify changes in values and determine whether the values are within threshold limits. Many mechanical and
electrical failures display some degradation in performance before failure.
A SMART failure is also referred to as a predicted failure. There are numerous factors that are predicted physical disk failures,
such as a bearing failure, a broken read/write head, and changes in spin-up rate. In addition, there are factors related to
read/write surface failure, such as seek error rate and excessive bad sectors.
NOTE:
For detailed information on SCSI interface specifications, see t10.org, and for detailed information on SATA
interface specifications, see t13.org.
Native Command Queuing
Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is a command protocol used by SATA physical disks supported on the S150 controller. NCQ
allows the host to provide multiple input/output requests to a disk simultaneously. The disk decides the order to process the
commands to achieve maximum performance.
NVMe PCIe SSD support
S150 supports the NVMe PCIe SSD-including the NVMe PCIe SSD 2.5-inch Small Form Factor (SFF) and NVMe PCIe SSD
Adapter.
The S150 supports the NVMe PCIe SSD 2.5-inch SFF and the NVMe PCIe SSD Adapter in a RAID configuration. The NVMe PCIe
SSD supports volume, non-RAID, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10. The S150 also supports the Prepare to remove feature to
remove the non-RAID NVMe drive from a Dell EMC OpenManage console.
In UEFI HII mode, you can use the NVMe PCIe SSD option on the device settings page to view NVMe physical disk properties
and perform blink or unblink operations.
NOTE:
Recommended minimum version to support the NVMe drives is listed below.
Drives S150 operating system driver S150 UEFI driver
Samsung PM1733/PM1735 6.0.3.0007 6.0.3.0005
12 Physical Disks