User Guide

14 Intel® Integrated RAID Solution User Guide
controller, up to a maximum of 14 disk drives for the two volumes. (The maximum
number includes one or two optional hot spare disks for the mirrored volume or volumes.)
Additional information about configuring a RAID volume follows:
• All physical disks in a volume must be either SATA (with extended command set
support) or SAS (with SMART support). You cannot combine SAS and SATA disks
in the same volume. However, you can create one volume with SAS disks and a
second volume with SATA disks on the same controller.
• Disks in the volume must have 512-byte blocks and must not have removable
media.
• Integrated Mirroring volumes must have two disks, Integrated Mirroring Enhanced
volumes contain three disks to ten disks, and Integrated Mirroring + Striping
volumes can have four, six, eight, or ten disks.
Note: Intel strongly recommends that you create global hot spare disks for all mirrored volumes
to increase the level of data protection. If a disk in a mirrored volume fails, the Integrated
RAID firmware rebuilds it using one of the global hot spares, and the data is safe. If you
create two mirrored volumes on an Intel SAS-3 controller, either of the volumes can use
the global hot spares if a disk fails.
Creating an Integrated Mirroring Volume
Follow these steps to create a two-disk Integrated Mirroring (RAID 1) volume with the
SAS3 BIOS CU. The steps begin with the Adapter List window that appears when the
SAS3 BIOS CU starts.
1. On the Adapter List window, use the arrow keys to select an Intel SAS-3 adapter,
and then press Enter.
The Adapter Properties window appears, as the following figure shows.