Users Guide
Table Of Contents
- Dell EMC PowerEdge RAID Controller S150 User’s Guide
- Contents
- 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
Virtual Disks
A logical grouping of physical disks attached to a PERC S150 allows you to create multiple virtual disks of the same RAID levels,
without exceeding a maximum of 30 virtual disks.
The PERC S150 controller allows:
● Creating virtual disks of different RAID levels on a S150 controller.
NOTE: Ensure that you do not mix RAID levels on the same physical disks.
● Building different virtual disks with different characteristics for different applications.
● Creating virtual disks from a mix of NVMe PCIe SSD 2.5-inch SFFs and NVMe PCIe SSD adapters.
The PERC S150 controller does not allow:
● Creating a virtual disk from a mix of different types of physical disks. For example, a RAID 10 virtual disk cannot be created
from two SATA HDD physical disks and a SATA SSD physical disk. All the physical disks must be of the same drive type
(HDD/SSD/NVMe PCIe SSDs).
● Selecting a physical disk as a dedicated hot spare if the physical disk is a different type from the physical disk of the virtual
disks.
A virtual disk refers to data storage which a controller creates using one or more physical disks.
NOTE: A virtual disk can be created from several physical disks; the operating system considers it a single disk.
The capacity of a virtual disk can be expanded online for any RAID level without rebooting the operating system.
NOTE:
If the boot VD is spanned across different SATA controllers, then Windows Hardware Quality Labs testing (WHQL),
DF - Reinstall with I/O Before and After (Reliability) fails in a server having two SATA controllers.
Topics:
• Virtual disk features
• Disk initialization
• Background Array Scan
• Checkpointing
• Virtual disk cache policies
• Virtual disk migration
• Expanding virtual disk capacity
Virtual disk features
TRIM for SATA SSDs
The TRIM command allows an operating system to delete a block of data that is no longer considered in use from the SATA
SSDs. TRIM resolves the Write Amplification issue for supported operating systems. When an operating system deletes a file,
the file is marked for deletion in the file system, but the contents on the disk are not actually erased. As a result, the SSDs do
not know that the Logical Block Addressing (LBA) file previously occupied can be erased. With the introduction of TRIM, when a
file is deleted, the operating system sends a TRIM command along with the LBAs that do not contain valid data.
NOTE: The TRIM feature is supported only on pass-through SSDs.
NOTE: The TRIM feature is not supported on NVMe PCIe SSDs.
3
14 Virtual Disks