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Chapter 9: Managing Logical Drives and Hot Spares ● 74
Understanding Logical Drives
A logical drive is a group of physical disk drives that appears to your
operating system as a single drive that can be used for storing data.
A logical drive can comprise one or more disk drives and can use part or
all of each disk drive’s capacity.
It is possible to include the same disk drive in two different logical
drives by using just a portion of the space on the disk drive in each, as
illustrated below.
Disk drive space that has been assigned to a logical drive is called a
segment. A segment can include all or just a portion of a disk drive’s
space. A disk drive with one segment is part of one logical drive, a disk
drive with two segments is part of two logical drives, and so on. A
segment can be part of only one logical drive. When a logical drive is
deleted, the segments that comprised it revert to available space (or free
segments).
A logical drive can include redundancy, depending on the RAID level
assigned to it. (See Understanding RAID on page 163 for more
information.)
Once a logical drive has been created, you can change its RAID level or
increase its capacity to meet changing requirements. You can also
protect your logical drives by assigning one or more hot spares to them.
(See page 90 for more information.)
Available
Space
Disk Drives (500 MB Each)
RAID 5 Logical Driv
e
R
AID 1 Logical Drive
250 MB
250 MB
250 MB 250 MB
250 MB
250 MB250 MB
250 MB
250 MB
250 MB
Segment (250 MB)Segment (250 MB)