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5.2.4 Integrated Striping Overview
This section provides an overview of the LSI Logic Integrated Striping (IS) feature.
5.2.4.1 Introduction
The LSI Logic Integrated Striping (IS) feature is useful for applications that require the faster performance
and increased storage capacity of striping. The low-cost IS feature has many of the advantages of a more
expensive RAID striping solution. A single IS logical drive may be configured as the boot disk or as a data
disk.
The IS feature is implemented with controller firmware that supports the Fusion-MPT Interface. IS
provides better performance and more capacity than individual disks, without burdening the host CPU. The
firmware splits host I/Os over multiple disks and presents the disks as a single logical drive. In general,
striping is transparent to the BIOS, the drivers, and the operating system.
The SAS BIOS CU is used to configure IS volumes, which can consist of two to eight disks.
Note
Integrated Mirroring and Integrated Striping volumes can be configured on the same LSI logic SAS
controller.
5.2.4.2 IS Features
Integrated Striping supports the following features:
Support for volumes with two to eight drives
Support for two IS volumes, with up to 10 drives total, on a controller. An IS volume can also be
combined with an IM or IME volume.
Presents a single virtual drive to the OS for each configured volume
Support for both SAS and SATA drives, although the two types of drives cannot be combined in
one volume
Fusion-MPT architecture
Easy-to-use SAS BIOS configuration utility
Error notification
Use of metadata to store volume configuration on disks
OS-specific event log
Error display inside the Fusion-MPT BIOS
SES status LED support for drives used in IS volumes
Note
Currently available LSI Logic SAS controllers support a maximum of eight drives.
All drives in a volume must be connected to the same SAS controller.
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