Table of Contents
Advertisement
Related tasks:
Installing PCI adapters
Serial-attached SCSI cable planning
Learn about how to install the SAS cables to the hard disk drives, solid-state drives or CD-ROMs.
Related reference:
IBM Prerequisite Web page
Parts information
PCI adapter placement
"Backplane daughter cards and RAID enablement cards" on page 2
Find links to topics that cover Backplane daughter cards and RAID enablement cards.
SAS RAID controllers for AIX
SAS RAID controllers for Linux
PCIe Dual - x4 3 Gb SAS RAID Adapter (FC 5903 and FC 5805; CCIN
574E)
Learn about the specifications and operating system requirements for the feature code (FC) 5903 and FC
5805 adapters.
Overview
The PCI Express (PCIe) Dual - x4 3 Gb SAS RAID Adapter supports the attachment of Serial attached
SCSI (SAS) disk and SAS solid-state drives using a pair of mini SAS 4x connectors. The 5903 or 5805 has
a 380 MB write cache and a concurrently replaceable cache battery pack. The adapter must always be
installed in pairs and is always to be used in a high availability, multi-initiator RAID configuration using
two adapters in dual-controller mode. Two 5903 or 5805 adapters provide mirrored write-cache data and
mirrored RAID parity footprints between the adapters. If the 5903 or 5805 pairing is broken, then write
cache is disabled.
Important: See the SAS RAID controllers for AIX, SAS RAID controllers for Linux, or SAS RAID
controllers for IBM i topics for more information and important considerations for multi-initiator and
high availability or dual storage IOA configurations
The 5903 or 5805 supports SAS small form factor (SFF) disk drives located in a PCIe 12X I/O Drawer or
SAS disk drives located in an EXP 12S Disk Drawer. It can also be connected to the internal disk drives in
the system unit using the appropriate split disk backplane feature and cabling.
The adapter is a 3.3 V, PCI-e x8 bootable SAS adapter that provides RAID 0, RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID
10 for the AIX and Linux operating systems. Under the IBM i operating system, mirroring and data
spreading are provided by the operating system, and RAID 5 and RAID 6 are provided by the adapter.
With adequate cabling and configuration, multiple wide ports are used to provide redundant paths to
each dual port SAS drive or solid-state drive. The adapter manages SAS path redundancy and path
switching in case a SAS failure occur.
The 5903 or 5805 contains a LED ((C) in Figure 15 on page 33) that flashes if the cache data is present.
The cache-data present LED flashes when there is possible data in the cache on the adapter. If the cache
data present LED is flashing, do not replace the cache battery pack. If replaced when the LED is flashing,
the cache data is lost. See Figure 15 on page 33 to locate the cache-data present LED on this adapter.
32
Power Systems: Managing PCI adapters for the 8233-E8B or 8236-E8C
Advertisement
Table of Contents
