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Level 4
On level 4, the firmware forms the host drives. Only these drives can be accessed by the host
operating system of the computer. The firmware automatically transforms each newly installed
logical drive and array drive into a host drive. This host drive is then assigned a host drive number
which is identical to its logical drive or array drive number.
The firmware is capable of running several kinds of host drives at the same time. For example, in
†
Windows
2000, drive C is a RAID 5 type host drive (consisting of five SCSI hard disk drives) and
drive D is a single hard disk drive. On this level the user may split an existing array drive into
several host drives.
After a capacity expansion of a given array drive the added capacity appears as a new host drive on
this level. It can be either used as a separate host drive, or merged with the first host drive of the
array drive. Within StorCon, each level of hierarchy has its own menu:
Level 1 - Configure Physical Devices
Level 2 - Configure Logical Drives
Level 3 - Configure Array Drives
Level 4 - Configure Host Drives
Generally, each installation procedure passes through these four menus, starting with level 1.
Installation includes the initializing the physical drives, configuring the logical drives, configuring
the array drives (for example, RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, and 10) and configuring the host drives.
Transparency of Host Drives
The structure of the host drives installed with StorCon (see Chapter 7, Storage Console) is not
known to the operating system. For example, the operating system does not recognize that a given
host drive consists of a number of hard disk drives forming a disk array.
To the operating system this host drive simply appears as one single hard disk drive with the
capacity of the disk array. This complete transparency represents the easiest way to operate disk
arrays under the operating system. Neither operating system nor the PCI computer need to be
involved in the administration of these complex disk array configurations.
20
Intel RAID SRCU31 Users Guide
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