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AOC-USAS-L8i Add-on Card User’s Manual
7-6
7-5 Fusion-MPT Support
The BIOS uses the LSI Fusion-MPT® interface to communicate to the SAS controller
and firmware to enable IM and IME volumes. This includes reading the Fusion-MPT
configuration to access the parameters that are used to define behavior between the
SAS controller and the devices connected to it. The Fusion-MPT drivers for all
supported operating systems implement the Fusion-MPT interface to communicate with
the controller and firmware.
7-6 IM/IME Configuration Overview
You can use the SAS BIOS CU to create one or two IM/IME volumes on each SAS
controller, with one or two optional global hot spare disks. All disks in an IM/IME volume
must be connected to the same SAS controller.
Although you can use disks of different size in IM and IME volumes, the smallest disk in
the volume will determine the logical size of all disks in the volume. In other words, the
excess space of the larger member disk(s) will not be used. For example, if you create
an IME volume with two 100-GB disks and two 120-GB disks, only 100-GB of the larger
disks will be used for the volume.
Refer to Section 7-2 below for more information about Integrated Mirroring volumes.
7-7 Creating IM and IME Volumes
The SAS BIOS CU is part of the Fusion-MPT BIOS. When the BIOS loads during boot
and you see the message about the Configuration Utility, press C
TRL-C to start the CU.
After you do this, the message changes to:
Please wait, invoking SAS Configuration Utility...
After a brief pause, the main menu of the SAS BIOS CU appears. On some systems,
however, the following message appears next:
LSI Configuration Utility will load following initialization!
In this case, the SAS BIOS CU will load after the system has completed its power-on
self test.
You can configure one or two IM or IME volumes per Fusion-MPT controller. You can
also configure one IM/IME and one Integrated Striping (IS) volume on the same
controller, up to a maximum of twelve physical disk drives for the two volumes. In
addition, you can create one or two hot spares for the IM/IME array(s).
The following guidelines also apply when creating an IM or IME volume:
• All physical disks in a volume must be either SATA (with extended command set
support) or SAS (with SMART support). SAS and SATA disks cannot be combined
in the same volume. However, you can create one volume with SAS disks and a
second volume with SATA disks on the same controller.
• Disks must have 512-byte blocks and must not have removable media.