Intel AFCSASRISER User Guide - Page 37

Number of Physical Disks, MegaRAID Fast Path, 4K Sector Drive Support, Larger than 2TB Drive Support

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With Dimmer Switch, any unconfigured drive connected to a MegaRAID controller is spun down after 30 minutes of inactivity, reducing its power usage. Spun down drives are spun up automatically when you create a configuration using those drives. Number of Physical Disks Your configuration planning for the SAS RAID controller depends in part on the number of physical disks that you want to use in a RAID array. The number of drives in an array determines the RAID levels that can be supported. Only one RAID level can be assigned to each virtual disk. MegaRAID Fast Path The MegaRAID Fast Path Premium Feature is a high performance IO Accelerator technology for Solid State Drive RAID Arrays connected to a MegaRAID adapter. There are two "Levels" to this feature. Level 1 Fast Path enabled by default without PFK. The "Standard" or Level 1 Fast Path pertains to general IO Path improvements to Write Through data transfers. Additionally, controller cache tuning has resulted in improvements to configurations leveraging write back mode. Level 2 Fast Path enabled automatically with Intel® RAID Premium Feature Key AXXRPFKSSD installed. Level 2 Fast Path is SSD-centric. This is where the Premium Feature kicks in by supporting full optimization of SSD Virtual Disk groups. With this premium feature enabled, Solid State Drive configurations tuned for small, random block-size IO activity -- typical of transactional database applications -- can sustain higher numbers of IO READs Per Second, compared with Level 1 Fast Path. The performance levels reached with this solution are equivalent to those of much costlier Flash-based adapter card solutions. Refer to Intel® RAID Premium Feature Key AXXRPFKSSD, AXXRPFKDE, and AXXRPFKSNSH Installation Guide (E88588-00x) for description of the Premium Feature Key (PFK) 4K Sector Drive Support The disk drive industry is in transition to support disk drives with native formatting of 4K sectors. 4K formatted drives provide an opportunity to improve capacity and error correction efficiencies as capacities grow, and as improvements in error correction are implemented. Drives supporting 4K sectors will also support a 512 byte emulation mode which will allow the drive to be operated with legacy OS and hardware products that do not support 4K byte sectors. Intel® plans to implement 4K sector support on all new products, beginning with those designed to utilize the LSI 2208 and LSI2308 SAS products. Currently shipping Intel® RAID and SAS products will support 4K sector drives running in legacy 512b sector mode. Larger than 2TB Drive Support The disk drive industry is in transition to support disk drives with volume size larger than 2 Terabytes. The Intel® 6G SAS PCIe Gen2 RAID Controllers can fully recognize and configure the volume of these disk drives. For the other RAID types listed in "Supported Hardware" section, there is no problem for the first 2TB space of the disk drive to be recognized and configured. Intel® RAID Software User's Guide 25

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Intel
®
RAID Software User’s Guide
25
With Dimmer Switch, any unconfigured drive connected to a MegaRAID controller is spun
down after 30 minutes of inactivity, reducing its power usage. Spun down drives are spun up
automatically when you create a configuration using those drives.
Number of Physical Disks
Your configuration planning for the SAS RAID controller depends in part on the number of
physical disks that you want to use in a RAID array. The number of drives in an array
determines the RAID levels that can be supported. Only one RAID level can be assigned to
each virtual disk.
MegaRAID Fast Path
The MegaRAID Fast Path Premium Feature is a high performance IO Accelerator technology
for Solid State Drive RAID Arrays connected to a MegaRAID adapter. There are two “Levels”
to this feature. Level 1 Fast Path enabled by default without PFK. The “Standard” or Level 1
Fast Path pertains to general IO Path improvements to Write Through data transfers.
Additionally, controller cache tuning has resulted in improvements to configurations
leveraging write back mode.
Level 2 Fast Path enabled automatically with Intel
®
RAID Premium Feature Key
AXXRPFKSSD installed. Level 2 Fast Path is SSD-centric. This is where the Premium
Feature kicks in by supporting full optimization of SSD Virtual Disk groups. With this
premium feature enabled, Solid State Drive configurations tuned for small, random block-size
IO activity -- typical of transactional database applications -- can sustain higher numbers of IO
READs Per Second, compared with Level 1 Fast Path. The performance levels reached with
this solution are equivalent to those of much costlier Flash-based adapter card solutions.
Refer to
Intel
®
RAID Premium Feature Key AXXRPFKSSD, AXXRPFKDE, and
AXXRPFKSNSH Installation Guide (E88588-00x)
for description of the Premium Feature Key
(PFK)
4K Sector Drive Support
The disk drive industry is in transition to support disk drives with native formatting of 4K
sectors. 4K formatted drives provide an opportunity to improve capacity and error correction
efficiencies as capacities grow, and as improvements in error correction are implemented.
Drives supporting 4K sectors will also support a 512 byte emulation mode which will allow
the drive to be operated with legacy OS and hardware products that do not support 4K byte
sectors. Intel
®
plans to implement 4K sector support on all new products, beginning with those
designed to utilize the LSI 2208 and LSI2308 SAS products. Currently shipping Intel
®
RAID
and SAS products will support 4K sector drives running in legacy 512b sector mode.
Larger than 2TB Drive Support
The disk drive industry is in transition to support disk drives with volume size larger than 2
Terabytes. The Intel
®
6G SAS PCIe Gen2 RAID Controllers can fully recognize and configure
the volume of these disk drives. For the other RAID types listed in “Supported Hardware”
section, there is no problem for the first 2TB space of the disk drive to be recognized and
configured.