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A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ MD1000 SAS SOLUTIONS
Performance
Support for 3.0 Gbps SAS physical disks (both 10,000 and 15,000 RPM)
•
External cable supports a SAS x4 wide-lane to achieve a total interface bandwidth of up to
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12.0 Gbps connection to the host controller
Host interconnect with the PERC 5/E host-based controller
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Support for RAID level 0
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Availability
Support for RAID levels 1, 5, 10 and 50
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Redundant, hot pluggable power supplies with integrated cooling fan modules
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Redundant enclosure management modules (EMMs)
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Hot pluggable physical disks
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Scalability/Expandability
Support for daisy-chaining up to three PowerVault MD1000 expansion enclosures per PERC
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5/E connection
Supports between 2 and 15 physical SAS drives
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Supports 36GB, 73GB, 146GB, and 300 GB 3.5-inch SAS physical disks
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Ease-of-Use
Common management software with PowerEdge™ servers through Dell OpenManage Server
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Administrator
PERC 5/E is the RAID controller used to connect the PowerVault MD1000 storage enclosure to
one or two PowerEdge servers. It supports 3 Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) as the storage
interconnect technology and PCI Express (PCI-E) as the host-based interconnect technology. The
"E" in PERC 5/E stands for "External" because the PERC 5/E controller supports only physical
disks that attach to a server externally.
The PERC 5/E controller offers:
Intel IOP333 I/O processor based on Intel XScale Microarchitecture
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256MB of customized DDR2 400MHz, Error-Correcting Code (ECC) cache memory
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3 Gbps maximum speed for each SAS lane
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Two external x4 ("by four") SAS ports, each aggregating 4 SAS lanes for a total bandwidth per
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port of 12.0 Gbps
x8 PCI E host interface for a total bandwidth of 32.0 Gbps
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Up to 72 hours of intelligent, transportable, battery-backed, cache memory
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For detailed information on the PERC 5/E controller, see section 6.
SAS Cabling
The PowerVault MD1000 storage enclosure and the PERC 5/E controller both support industry
standard 3.0 Gbps SAS cables in 1m, 2m, and 4m cable lengths. Each cable supports x4 SAS
connectors to deliver up to 12.0 Gbps of total bandwidth from the host to the enclosure. Only Dell-
qualified cables are supported for connecting the PowerVault MD1000 storage enclosure to the
PERC 5/E controller.
Physical Drive Support
The PowerVault MD1000 storage expansion enclosure supports the latest SAS physical disks,
currently specified as 3.0 Gbps SAS. SAS solutions from Dell include both 10,000 RPM and
15,000 RPM spindle speeds and a variety of capacities to allow customers the maximum flexibility.
PAGE 8
VER A00
5/06/2005
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