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5-12 Configuring Physical Drives, Arrays, and Logical Drives
Copyright © 2002 by LSI Logic Corporation. All rights reserved.
5.4 Configuring Logical Drives
After you have installed the MegaRAID SCSI 320-0 controller in the
server and have attached all physical disk drives, perform the following
actions to prepare a RAID array:
1. Optimize MegaRAID SCSI 320-0 controller options for your system.
See Chapter 6 for additional information.
2. Press <Ctrl><M> to run the BIOS Configuration Utility.
3. If necessary, perform a low-level format of the SCSI drives that will
be included in the array and the drives to be used for hot spares.
4. Customize the RAID array and define and configure one or more
logical drives by selecting Easy Configuration or New Configuration.
5. Create and configure one or more system drives (logical drives) by
selecting the RAID level, cache policy, read policy, and write policy.
6. Save the configuration.
7. Initialize the system drives.
After initialization, you can install the operating system.
5.4.1 Optimizing Data Storage
5.4.1.1 Data Access Requirements
Each type of data stored in the disk subsystem has a different frequency
of read and write activity. If you know the data access requirements, you
can more successfully determine a strategy for optimizing the disk
subsystem capacity, availability, and performance.
Servers that support Video on Demand typically read the data often, but
write data infrequently. Both the read and write operations tend to be
long. Data stored on a general-purpose file server involves relatively
short read and write operations with relatively small files.
5.4.1.2 Array Functions
You must first define the major purpose of the disk array. Will this disk
array increase the system storage capacity for general-purpose file and