SAS2 Integrated RAID Solution User Guide Chapter 4: Overview of Integrated Striping | Introduction
LSI Corporation Confidential
| August 2010 Page 23
Chapter 4
4.1 Introduction The LSI Integrated RAID solution enables you to create Integrated Striping volumes for
applications that require the faster performance and increased storage capacity of
striping. The low-cost Integrated Striping feature has many of the advantages of a more
expensive RAID striping solution. You can configure an Integrated Striping volume as
the boot disk or as a data disk.
The Integrated Striping solution provides better performance and more capacity than
individual disks, without burdening the host CPU. The firmware distributes host I/O
transactions over multiple disks and presents the disks as a single, logical drive. In
general, striping is transparent to the BIOS, the drivers, and the operating system.
You can use the LSI SAS2 BIOS CU to configure Integrated Striping volumes. These
volumes can consist of two-to-ten disks.
4.2 Integrated Striping Features Integrated Striping supports the following features:
Support for volumes with two-to-ten disks
Support for two Integrated Striping volumes with up to 14 drives total on a
SAS2 controller.
Support for combining one Integrated Striping volume and one Integrated
Mirroring, Integrated Mirroring + Striping, or Integrated Mirroring Enhanced
volume on a single controller.
Support for both SAS and SATA drives, although you cannot combine the two types
of drives in one volume
Fusion-MPT architecture
Easy-to-use SAS BIOS configuration utility
Error notification
Disk write caching, which is enabled by default on all Integrated Striping volumes
Use of metadata to store volume configurations on disks
OS-specific event log
Error display inside the Fusion-MPT BIOS
SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) status LED support for drives used in Integrated
Striping volumes
Overview of Integrated Striping
This chapter provides an overview of the LSI Integrated RAID features that support the
creation of striped arrays.