Online Spares; Logical Storage Elements; Logical Drives (Luns); Two Arrays (A1, A2) And Five Logical Drives (L1 Through L5) Spread Over Five Physical Drives - HP ProLiant DL380 G5 Administration Manual

The table below summarizes the important features of the different kinds of RAID supported by the
Smart Array controllers. The decision chart in the following table can help determine which option is
best for different situations.
Table 12 Summary of RAID methods
Maximum number of
hard drives
Tolerant of single hard
drive failure?
Tolerant of multiple
simultaneous hard drive
failures?

Online Spares

Further protection against data loss can be achieved by assigning an online spare (or hot spare) to any
configuration except RAID 0. This hard drive contains no data and is contained within the same storage
subsystem as the other drives in the array. When a hard drive in the array fails, the controller can then
automatically rebuild information that was originally on the failed drive onto the online spare. This quickly
restores the system to full RAID level fault tolerance protection. However, unless RAID Advanced Data
Guarding (ADG) is being used, which can support two drive failures in an array, in the unlikely event that
a third drive in the array should fail while data is being rewritten to the spare, the logical drive still fails.

Logical storage elements

Logical storage elements consist of those components that translate the physical storage elements to file
system elements. The storage server uses the Window Disk Management utility to manage the various
types of disks presented to the file system. There are two types of LUN presentation: basic disk and
dynamic disk. Each of these types of disk has special features that enable different types of management.

Logical drives (LUNs)

While an array is a physical grouping of hard drives, a logical drive consists of components that translate
physical storage elements into file system elements.
It is important to note that a LUN may extend over (span) all physical drives within a storage controller
subsystem, but cannot span multiple storage controller subsystems.
L1
L2
Figure 20 Two arrays (A1, A2) and five logical drives (L1 through L5) spread over
five physical drives
48 Storage management overview
RAID 0
Striping
(no fault
tolerance)
N/A
No
No
A1
RAID 1+0 RAID 5
Mirroring Distributed
Data
Guarding
14
N/A
Yes Yes
No
If the failed
drives are not
mirrored to each
other
A2
L3
L4
L5
gl0045
RAID ADG
Storage system
dependent
Yes
Yes (two drives can fail)