User Guide

Intel® Integrated RAID Solution User Guide 25
4 Overview of Integrated Striping
This chapter provides an overview of the Intel
®
Integrated RAID features that support the
creation of striped volumes.
Overview
The Intel
®
Integrated RAID Solution enables you to create Integrated Striping volumes
for applications that require the faster performance and increased storage capacity of
striping. The low-cost Integrated Striping feature has many of the advantages of more
expensive RAID striping solutions. An Integrated Striping volume can be the boot disk or
a data disk.
The Integrated Striping solution provides better performance and more capacity than
individual disks, without burdening the host CPU. The firmware distributes host I/O
transactions over multiple disks and presents the disks to the OS as a single volume. In
general, striping is transparent to the BIOS, the drivers, and the operating system.
Use the Intel SAS3 BIOS CU to configure Integrated Striping volumes.
Integrated Striping Features
Integrated Striping supports the following features:
• Support for RAID volumes with two disks to ten disks
• Support for two Integrated Striping volumes with up to 14 drives total on a SAS-3
controller
• Support for combining one Integrated Striping volume and one Integrated
Mirroring, Integrated Mirroring + Striping, or Integrated Mirroring Enhanced
volume on a single controller
• Support for both SAS and SATA drives, although you cannot combine the two types
of drives in one volume
• Fusion-MPT architecture
• Easy-to-use SAS-3 BIOS configuration utility
• Error notification
• Disk write caching, which is enabled by default on all Integrated Striping volumes
• Use of metadata to store volume configurations on disks
• OS-specific event log