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RAID 5 drive group. Blocks of data and parity information are written across all drives. The parity
information is used to recover the data if one or two drives fail in the drive group.
RAID 6 requires a minimum number of three HDDs.
• RAID 10: a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1
RAID 10 consists of striped data across mirrored spans. A RAID 10 drive group is a spanned drive group
that creates a striped set from a series of mirrored drives. RAID 10 allows a maximum of eight spans. You
must use an even number of drives in each RAID virtual drive in the span. The RAID 1 virtual drives must
have the same stripe size. RAID 10 provides high data throughput and complete data redundancy but
uses a larger number of spans.
RAID 10 requires a minimum number of four HDDs and also requires an even number of drives, for
example, six HDDs or eight HDDs.
• RAID 50: a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 5
RAID 50 uses distributed parity and disk striping. A RAID 50 drive group is a spanned drive group in which
data is striped across multiple RAID 5 drive groups. RAID 50 works best with data that requires high
reliability, high request rates, high data transfers, and medium-to-large capacity.
Note: Having virtual drives of different RAID levels, such as RAID 0 and RAID 5, in the same drive group is
not allowed. For example, if an existing RAID 5 virtual drive is created out of partial space in an array, the
next virtual drive in the array has to be RAID 5 only.
RAID 50 requires a minimum number of six HDDs.
• RAID 60: a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 6
RAID 60 uses distributed parity, with two independent parity blocks per stripe in each RAID set, and disk
striping. A RAID 60 virtual drive can survive the loss of two drives in each of the RAID 6 sets without losing
data. RAID 60 works best with data that requires high reliability, high request rates, high data transfers,
and medium-to-large capacity.
RAID 60 requires a minimum number of six HDDs.
For detailed information about RAID, refer to "Introduction to RAID" in the MegaRAID SAS Software User
Guide. This guide is available on the Lenovo Support Web site at:
http://www.lenovo.com/support
RAID for your server
Note: Before configuring RAID for your server, ensure that you use HDDs that are of the same type (SATA or
SAS) and have the same capacity within a single RAID array.
Your server supports the following two types of RAID configurations:
• Onboard SATA software RAID configuration
The onboard SATA software RAID controller is integrated on the Intel C220 chip on the system board. If
your server has SATA HDDs that are connected to the system board, you can use the Intel Rapid Storage
Technology enterprise program to configure RAID. By default, your server supports onboard SATA
software RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 10.
For detailed information, see "Configuring onboard SATA software RAID" on page 44.
• Advanced SATA/SAS hardware RAID configuration (requires a RAID card)
Some server models come with a required RAID card to provide advanced SATA/SAS hardware RAID
functions to the server. You also can purchase the RAID card from Lenovo and install it into server models
that support the RAID card to get advanced SATA/SAS hardware RAID functions. See "RAID card" on
page 24 and "PCIe card" on page 54 for more information.
The RAID card provides the WebBIOS Configuration Utility program to help you configure RAID
independently of the operating system. You also can install the MegaRAID Storage Manager program and
.
Chapter 4
Configuring the server
43
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