Virtual Disks; Virtual Disk Features; Trim For Ssds; Disk Initialization - Dell PowerEdge S130 User Manual

Virtual Disks

A logical grouping of physical disks attached to a PERC S130 allows creating multiple virtual disks of the same RAID levels, without
exceeding a maximum of ten virtual disks.
The PERC S130 controller allows:
• Creating virtual disks of different RAID levels on a S130 controller.
NOTE: Ensure that you do not mix RAID levels on the same physical disks.
• Building different virtual disks with different characteristics for different applications.
The PERC S130 controller does not allow:
• Creating a virtual disk from a mix of different type physical disks. For example, a RAID 10 virtual disk cannot be created from two
SATA HDD physical disks and a SATA SSD physical disk. All of the physical disks must be of the same drive type (HDD or SSD).
• Selecting a physical disk as a dedicated hot spare if the physical disk is a different type from the physical disk of the virtual disks.
A virtual disk refers to data storage, which a controller creates using one or more physical disks.
NOTE: A virtual disk can be created from several physical disks, the operating system considers it a single disk.
The capacity of a virtual disk can be expanded online for any RAID level without rebooting the operating system.

Virtual disk features

TRIM for SSDs

TRIM allows an operating system to delete a block of data that is no longer considered in use, from the SSDs. The TRIM command
resolves the Write Amplification issue for operating systems that have been supported. When an operating system deletes a file, the
file is marked for deletion in the file system, but the contents on the disk are not actually erased. As a result, the SSDs do not know
that the LBA (Logical Block Addressing) file previously occupied that can be erased. With the introduction of TRIM, when a file is
deleted, the operating system sends a TRIM command along with the LBAs that do not contain valid data.
NOTE: TRIM feature is supported only on the pass-through SSDs.
To perform TRIM on the pass-through SSDs
1. Create a volume on a pass-through SSD drive.
2. In Windows operating system, navigate to the Defragmentation and Optimize Drive tool.
3. Select the volume created on the pass-through SSD and click the Optimize button.
The volume is trimmed.

Disk initialization

For physical disks, initialization writes metadata to the physical disk so that the controller can use the physical disk.
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