Intel - Penguin Computing Relion 1900e Technical Manual

rate. RAID 5 is well suited for applications that require high amounts of storage while maintaining
fault tolerance.
Note: RAID configurations cannot span across the two embedded AHCI SATA controllers.
By using Intel ® RSTe, there is no loss of PCI resources (request/grant pair) or add-in card slot. Intel
functionality requires the following:
The SW-RAID option must be enable in <F2> BIOS Setup


Intel

® RSTe option must be selected in <F2> BIOS Setup

Intel ® RSTe drivers must be loaded for the installed operating system

At least two SATA drives needed to support RAID levels 0 or 1

At least three SATA drives needed to support RAID levels 5

At least four SATA drives needed to support RAID levels 10

®
With Intel RSTe SW-RAID enabled, the following features are made available:
A boot-time, pre-operating system environment, text mode user interface that allows the user to

manage the RAID configuration on the system. Its feature set is kept simple to keep size to a
minimum, but allows the user to create and delete RAID volumes and select recovery options when
problems occur. The user interface can be accessed by pressing the <CTRL-I> keys during system
POST.
Provides boot support when using a RAID volume as a boot disk. It does this by providing Int13

services when a RAID volume needs to be accessed by MS-DOS applications (such as NTLDR) and by
exporting the RAID volumes to the System BIOS for selection in the boot order
At each boot up, provides the user with a status of the RAID volumes

5.6.2 Intel ® Embedded Server RAID Technology 2 (ESRT2) 1.41
Features of ESRT2 include the following:
Based on Avago* MegaRAID Software Stack

Software RAID with system providing memory and CPU utilization

RAID Level 0 - Non-redundant striping of drive volumes with performance scaling up to 6 drives,

enabling higher throughput for data intensive applications such as video editing.
Data security is offered through RAID Level 1, which performs mirroring.

RAID Level 10 provides high levels of storage performance with data protection, combining the fault-

tolerance of RAID Level 1 with the performance of RAID Level 0. By striping RAID Level 1 segments,
high I/O rates can be achieved on systems that require both performance and fault-tolerance. RAID
Level 10 requires 4 hard drives, and provides the capacity of two drives
Optional support for RAID Level 5

o Enabled with the addition of an optionally installed ESRT2 SATA RAID 5 Upgrade Key (iPN -
RKSATA4R5)
o RAID Level 5 provides highly efficient storage while maintaining fault-tolerance on 3 or more
drives. By striping parity, and rotating it across all disks, fault tolerance of any single drive is
achieved while only consuming 1 drive worth of capacity. That is, a 3 drive RAID 5 has the
capacity of 2 drives, or a 4 drive RAID 5 has the capacity of 3 drives. RAID 5 has high read
transaction rates, with a medium write rate. RAID 5 is well suited for applications that require
high amounts of storage while maintaining fault tolerance
43
Relion 1900e/2900e Manual
® RSTe
Revision 1.3