Dell PowerVault MD3200 Owner's Manual - Page 35

4 Planning: MD3200 Series Storage Array Terms and Concepts This chapter explains terms and concepts used for configuration and operation of MD3200 Series Storage Arrays. Physical Disks, Virtual Disks, and Disk Groups Physical disks in your storage array provide the physical storage capacity for your data. Before you can begin writing data to the storage array, you must configure the physical storage capacity into logical components, called disk groups and virtual disks. A disk group is a set of physical disks upon which multiple virtual disks are created. The maximum number of physical disks supported in a disk group is 96 drives for RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID10, and 30 drives for RAID 5 and RAID 6. You can create disk groups from unconfigured capacity on your storage array. A virtual disk is a partition in a disk group that is made up of contiguous data segments of the physical disks in the disk group. A virtual disk consists of data segments from all physical disks in the disk group. Virtual disks and disk groups are set up according to how you plan to organize your data. For example, you might have one virtual disk for inventory, a second virtual disk for financial and tax information, and so on. All virtual disks in a disk group support the same RAID level. The storage array supports up to 255 virtual disks (minimum size of 10 MB each) that can be assigned to host servers. Each virtual disk is assigned a Logical Unit Number (LUN) that is recognized by the host operating system. Planning: MD3200 Series Storage Array Terms and Concepts 35