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
To perform TRIM on the pass-through SSDs
1. Create a volume on a pass-through SSD drive.
2. In the Windows operating system, navigate to the Defragmentation and Optimize Drive tool.
3. Select the volume created on the pass-through SSD and click Optimize.
TRIM is applied.
Disk initialization
For physical disks, initialization writes metadata to the physical disk so that the controller can use the physical disk.
Background Array Scan
Verifies and rectifies correctable media errors on mirror, volume, or parity data for virtual disks. Background Array Scan (BAS)
starts automatically after a virtual disk is created while in the Windows operating system.
Checkpointing
Allows different types of checkpointing to resume at the last point following a restart. After the system restarts, background
checkpointing resumes at its most recent checkpoint.
Three types of checkpointing are available:
● Consistency Check (CC)
● Background Initialization (BGI)
● Rebuild
Consistency check
Consistency check (CC) is a background operation that verifies and corrects the mirror or parity data for fault-tolerant physical
disks. It is recommended that you periodically run a consistency check on the physical disks.
By default, CC corrects mirror or parity inconsistencies. After the data is corrected, the data on the primary physical disk in a
mirror set is assumed to be the correct data and is written to the secondary physical disk mirror set.
The CC operation reports data inconsistencies through an event notification. A CC cannot be user-initiated in the BIOS
configuration utility, accessed using Ctrl + R. However, CC can be initiated using OpenManage Server Administrator Storage
Management. For more information, see the OMSA user’s guide at www.dell.com/openmanagemanuals.
Background initialization
Background initialization (BGI) of a redundant virtual disk creates the parity data that allows the virtual disk to maintain its
redundant data and survive a physical disk failure. Similar to CC, BGI helps the controller to identify and correct problems that
might occur with the redundant data at a later time.
CAUTION: Data is lost if a physical disk fails before the completion of a BGI operation.
BGI allows a redundant virtual disk to be used immediately.
NOTE:
Although a BGI is software-initiated from within the BIOS Configuration Utility (accessible through Ctrl + R), the
PERC S150 drivers must be loaded before the BGI runs.
Automatic virtual disk rebuild
Rebuilds a redundant virtual disk automatically when a failure is detected if a hot spare is assigned for this capability.
Virtual Disks
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