Technical information

How Do I Make Use of the Spanning Feature?
2-60 RAID EzAssist User’s Manual
Unused Drives.
• When buttons are in focus, arrow keys select a button and Enter
activates the highlighted button.
 Caution
The drives you select to comprise the array will all be
treated as having the capacity of the smallest selected
drive, regardless of the actual capacities. This could
lead to wasted drive space. Therefore, try whenever
possible to select drives of similar capacity when
building an array.
“How many drives should I select for each spanned array?”
The answer depends on the RAID levels you want to be able to choose for
the logical drives you’ll set up in that array. See Table 2-7.
Table 2-7. Required Numbers of Drives By RAID Level
☞ Use the arrow keys to select a disk drive in the Unused Drives
field, then press Enter to accept the drive into the disk array.
☞ Repeat the step above for as many disk drives as you wish to
add to the array.
☞ When you’ve finished adding drives, press the Tab key to
switch focus to the buttons.
Figure 2-62 is a example of how your screen might look after the steps
above.
Desired RAID Level Number of Drives to Select
RAID 00 (Spanned Striping) At least 2 drives of equal size
RAID 10 (Spanned Mirroring) Exactly 2 drives of equal size
RAID 30 (Spanned Parity Drive)
RAID 50 (Spanned Striping with Parity)
RAID 0+1+0 (Spanned Striping with Mirroring)
At least 3 drives of equal size