Technical Product Specification

Intel® RAID Controller SRCSAS18E RAID Functionality and Features

Revision 1.01

Intel order number D61769-001

4. RAID Functionality and Features

4.1 Hierarcy

A fundamental purpose of a RAID system is to present a usable data storage medium (virtual

drive) with some level of redundancy to a host operating system. The Intel RAID firmware is

based on the concept of associating physical drives in arrays and then creating a virtual drive

from that array that includes a functional RAID level. To create a virtual drive and present it to

the host operating system, the RAID firmware typically follows these steps:

1. One or more physical drives are selected and associated as an array.

2. One or more arrays are associated and given a RAID level. This process creates a virtual

drive and provides an option to initialize the virtual drive. Virtual drives can be given the

following RAID levels:

3. The RAID firmware presents the virtual drive to the operating system.

4.1.1 RAID Physical Drive Status

Table 10. RAID Physical Drive Status

Drive State Code Description

Unconfigured

Good

Unconfigured Good The drive is functioning normally, but is not part of a configured virtual

drive and is not a hot spare.

Online ONLN The drive is online, is part of a configured virtual drive, and is functioning

normally.

Hot Spare HOTSP A physical disk that is configured as a hotspare.

Failed FAILED A physical disk that was originally configured as Online or Hot Spare, but

on which the firmware detects unrecoverable error.

Rebuilding REBUILD A physical disk to which data is beign written to restore full redundancy for

a virtual disk.

Unconfigured

Bad

Unconfigured Bad A physical disk on which the firmware detects an unrecoverable error; the

physical disk was Unconfigured Good or the physical disk could ot be

initialized.

Missing; Missing A physical disk that was Online, but which as been removed from its

location.

Offline Offline A physical disk that is part of a virtual disk but which has invalid data as far

as the RAID configuration is concerned.

None None A physical disk with an unsupported flag set. An Unconfigured Good or

Offlline physical disk that has completed the prepare for removal operation.