User Guide

2 Intel® Integrated RAID Solution User Guide
Benefits and Features
The Intel
®
Integrated RAID Solution has the following benefits and features:
• Support for up to 10 disks per Integrated RAID volume, with one or two volumes on
each SAS-3 controller. Each controller can support 14 volume drives, including one
or two hot spare disks.
• Support for two-disk Integrated Mirroring volumes (RAID 1).
• Support for disk drives with 512-byte sectors and disk drives with 4-KB sectors.
Note: An Integrated RAID volume must use all 512-byte-sector drives or all 4-KB-
sector drives. You cannot combine the two types of drives in a single volume.
Also, some operating systems do not fully support 4-KB-sector drives. Refer to
the documentation for the operating system you are using.
• Support for online capacity expansion (OCE) for RAID 1 volumes. OCE permits
you to increase the size of a RAID 1 volume by replacing the disk drives with
higher-capacity drives.
• Support for RAID volumes, and physical disks within a RAID volume, where the
volume or disk exceeds 241 bytes (2.199 TB or 2 TiB).
• Low-cost RAID volume creation, which meets the needs of most internal RAID
installations.
• Easy installation and configuration.
• Support for booting from any kind of Integrated RAID volume.
• Ability to operate without special operating system-specific software.
• High reliability and data integrity.
— Nonvolatile write journaling.
— Physical disks in a volume are not visible to the operating system (OS) or to
application software.
• Low host CPU utilization and PCI* bus utilization.
• Processing power provided by Fusion-MPT architecture. Shared-memory
architecture minimizes external memory requests.
Host Interface
The Integrated RAID host interface uses the message-passing interface, as described in
the Fusion-MPT 2.5 MPI Specification. The Fusion-MPT interface gives the host OS
access to the RAID volumes as well as to additional non-RAID physical disks.