Intel RS2BL040 - Raid Controller Hardware User's Manual

Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Hardware User’s Guide

Intel Order Number: E64391-001

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ii Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Hardware User’s Guide

Preface

This is the primary hardware guide for the Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040, for use with the SAS and SATA disk drives. It contains installation instructions and specifications.

For details on how to configure the storage adapters, and for an overview of the software drivers, see the Intel

Audience

This document assumes that you have some familiarity with RAID controllers and related support devices. The people who benefit from this book are:

• Engineers who are designing an Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 for a system.

• Anyone installing an Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 in a RAID system.

Organization

This document includes the following chapters and appendixes:

• Chapter 1 provides a general overview of the Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040.

• Chapter 2 describes the procedures for installing the RAID controller.

• Chapter 3 provides the characteristics and technical specifications for the Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040.

RAID Software User’s Guide on the Resource CD.

• Appendix A explains drive roaming and how to do a drive migration.

Related Publication

The Intel® RAID Software User’s Guide is on the Resource CD that ships with the RAID controller.

Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Hardware User’s Guide iii

iv Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Hardware User’s Guide

Preface ........................................................................................................................iii

Audience ............................................................................................................................... iii

Organization ......................................................................................................................... iii

Related Publication ............................................................................................................... iii

Chapter 1, Overview ................................................................................................... 1

Benefits of SAS ......................................................................................................................1

Intel

RAID Controller RS2BL040 .........................................................................................2

Protocol Support ............................................................................................................2

Operating System Support ............................................................................................2

Usability .........................................................................................................................3

SAS/SATA Features of the LSISAS2108 Controller ......................................................5

Beep Codes ...................................................................................................................5

Chapter 2, Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Hardware Installation ..................... 7

Requirements ........................................................................................................................7

Installing the RAID Controller ................................................................................................7

Configuring the RAID Controller ..........................................................................................11

Replacing a Controller .........................................................................................................11

Resolving a Configuration Mismatch ...................................................................................11

Chapter 3, Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Characteristics .............................. 13

Technical Specifications ......................................................................................................14

Array Performance Features ...............................................................................................15

Fault Tolerance ............................................................................................................16

Safety Characteristics ..................................................................................................17

A. Drive Roaming and Drive Migration Install ........................................................ 19

Drive Roaming .....................................................................................................................19

Drive Migration .....................................................................................................................20

B. Installation / Assembly Safety Instructions ....................................................... 21

English .................................................................................................................................23

Deutsch ................................................................................................................................24

Français ...............................................................................................................................25

Español ................................................................................................................................27

Italiano .................................................................................................................................28

C. Regulatory and Certification Information .......................................................... 31

Electromagnetic Compatibility Notices ................................................................................33

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vi Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Hardware User’s Guide

List of Figures

Figure 1. Changing the bracket................................................................................................. 8

Figure 2. Installing the Intel

Figure 3. Connecting Cables between the RAID Controller and Drives/Backplane.................. 9

Figure 4. Card Layout.............................................................................................................. 13

RAID Controller RS2BL040 ........................................................ 8

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viii Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Hardware User’s Guide

List of Tables

Table 1. Jumper Description ...................................................................................................13

Table 2. Technical Specifications ............................................................................................14

Table 3. Array Performance Features .....................................................................................15

Table 4. Fault Tolerance Features ..........................................................................................16

Table 5. Electrical Characteristics ...........................................................................................17

Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Hardware User’s Guide 1

2 Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Hardware User’s Guide

1 Overview

The Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 is a high-performance, intelligent PCI Express*

2.0-compliant SAS/SATA II RAID controller that offers reliability, high performance, and fault-tolerant disk subsystem management. This is a RAID solution that meets the internal storage needs of workgroup, department, or enterprise systems to use cost-effective SATA or high-performance SAS media.

As a second-generation PCI Express* RAID controller, the Intel RS2BL040 addresses the growing demand for increased data throughput and scalability requirements across mid-range and enterprise-class server platforms.

The controller can be connected to up to four drives directly and allows the use of expanders to connect to additional drives. Note that all expander features will not be available at product launch. For more information about the use of expanders, see the ANSI SAS Standard Specification, Version 2.0.

SATA and SAS are serial, point-to-point device interfaces that use simplified cabling, smaller connectors, lower pin counts, and lower power requirements than parallel SCSI.

The optional Intel® RAID Smart Battery AXXRSBBU7 provides cached data protection for the RAID controller, even during system failures.

RAID Controller

Benefits of SAS

SAS is a serial, point-to-point, enterprise-level device interface that leverages the proven SCSI protocol set. SAS is a convergence of the advantages of SATA, SCSI, and Fibre Channel, and is the future mainstay of the enterprise and high-end workstation storage markets. SAS offers a higher bandwidth per pin than parallel SCSI and improves signal and data integrity.

The SAS interface uses the proven SCSI command set to ensure reliable data transfers, while providing the connectivity and flexibility of point-to-point serial data transfers. The serial transmission of SCSI commands eliminates clock skew challenges. The SAS interface provides improved performance, simplified cabling, smaller connectors, lower pin count, and lower power requirements than parallel SCSI.

SAS controllers leverage a common electrical and physical connection interface that is compatible with Serial ATA technology. The SAS and SATA protocols use a thin, 7-wire connector instead of the 68-wire SCSI cable or 40-wire ATA cable. The SAS/SATA connector and cable are easier to manipulate, connect to smaller devices, and do not inhibit airflow. The point-to-point SATA architecture eliminates difficulties created by the legacy ATA master-slave architecture while maintaining compatibility with existing ATA firmware.

Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Hardware User’s Guide 1

Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040

The Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 is an intelligent, low-profile RAID adapter with an integrated LSI SAS2108 RAID-On-Chip chipset, providing both a SAS controller and RAID engine. With 512-MB RAM built onto the board and four independent ports supporting 6 Gb/s and 3 Gb/s SAS data transfers using one SFF-8087 mini multi-lane connectors, this controller supports up to 16 enterprise-class SAS or SATA devices and 64 virtual drives. The PCI Express* connector fits into an x8 or x16 PCI Express* slot capable of performance up to 5 Gb/s per lane.

The SAS RAID controllers support the SAS protocol as described in the Serial Attached SCSI Standard, Version 2.0. The controllers also support the Serial ATA II (SATA II) protocol defined by the Serial ATA Specification, Version 1.0a and the Serial ATA II: Extension to the Serial ATA Specification, Version 1.1. SATA II is an extension to SATA

1.0a.

In addition, the SAS RAID controllers support the following SATA II features:

• 3 Gb/s SATA II

• Staggered spin-up

• Hot plug

• Native command queuing

• Activity and fault indicators for each PHY

• Port selector (for dual-port drives)

Protocol Support

Each port on the SAS controllers supports SAS devices, SATA II devices, or both using SSP, SMP, STP, and SATA II as follows:

• Serial SCSI Protocol (SSP) to enable communication with other SAS devices.

• SATA II Protocol to enable communication with other SATA II devices.

• Serial Management Protocol (SMP) to share topology management information

with expanders.

• Serial Tunneling Protocol (STP) support for SATA II through expander interfaces.

Operating System Support

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003*, Microsoft Windows Server 2008*, and Windows

Vista * .

• Red Hat* Enterprise Linux 4.0, and 5.0.

• SuSE* Linux Enterprise Server 10 and 11.

2 Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Hardware User’s Guide

All operating systems supported by the RAID controller may not be supported by your server board. To verify compatibility, see the Tested Operating System List for your server board at http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/.

Usability

To make sure the RAID controller supports your operating system, refer to the Tested Hardware and Operating System List for the Intel

RAID Controller RS2BL040.

• The card ships with both a standard and a low-profile bracket.

• Small, thin cabling with up to 6.0 Gb/s serial, point-to-point data transfer rates

• Support for non-disk devices and mixed capacity drives

• Support for intelligent XOR RAID levels 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60

• Dedicated or global hot spare with auto rebuild if an array drive fails

• User-defined stripe size per drive: 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, or 1024 KB

• Advanced Array configuration and Management Utilities provides:

— Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) adds space to existing drive or new drive.

See Appendix A for limitations on OCE and RAID migration.

— Online RAID level migration (upgrade of RAID mode may require OCE).

— Drive migration

— Drive roaming

— No reboot necessary after expansion

— Load Balancing

• Upgradeable Flash ROM interface

• Allows for staggered spin up, hot-plug, and lower power consumption

• User-specified rebuild rate (percent of system resources to use from 0-100%)

Caution: Exceeding 50% rate may cause operating system errors due to waiting for

controller access.

• Background operating mode can be set for Rebuilds, Consistency Checks,

Initialization (auto restarting Consistency Check on redundant volumes), Migration, OCE, and Patrol Read.

• Allows mixed connections to SAS targets or SATA II targets

Note: Intel recommends that you carefully assess any decision to mix SAS and SATA drives

within the same virtual drive. Although you can mix drives within the same virtual drive, Intel strongly discourages the practice. However, you should never mix SAS and SATA drives within the same enclosure.

Intel® RAID Controller RS2BL040 Hardware User’s Guide 3

Redundancy and Error Handling

• In-band and out-of-band SES2.

• Enclosure management support.

• Support the internal SAS Sideband signal SFF-8485 (SGPIO) interface.

• Drive coercion (auto-resizing to match existing disks).

• Auto-detection of failed drives with transparent rebuild. There must be disk activity

(I/O to the drive) for a missing drive to be marked as failed.

• Auto-resume on reboot of initialization or rebuild (must be enabled before virtual

disk creation).

• Smart initialization automatically checks consistency of virtual disks if there are five

or more disks in a RAID 5 array, which optimizes performance by enabling readmodify-write mode. RAID 5 arrays of only three or four drives use Peer Read mode.

• Dirty cache LED plus error reporting for cache write to disk.

• Smart Technology predicts failures of drives and electronic components.

• Patrol Read checks drives and maps bad sectors.

• Commands are retried at least four times.

• Firmware provides best effort to recognize an error and recover if possible.

• Failures are logged from controller and drive firmware, and SMART monitor.

• Failures are logged in NVRAM, viewable from OS Event Log, Intel

Console 2; CIM, LEDs, and via alarm.

RAID Web

• Multiple cache options allow configuration-specific performance optimization:

— Write-back: Faster because it does not wait for the disk but data will be lost if

power is lost.

— Write-through: Usually slower but ensures data is on the disk.

— Read Ahead: Predicts next read will be sequential and buffers this data into the

cache.

— Non-Read Ahead: Always reads from the drive after determining exact location

of each read.

— Adaptive Read Ahead: Reads ahead and caches data only if doing sequential

reads.

— I/O setting: Determines whether read operations check the cache before reading

from disks.

✧ Cache I/O: Checks cache first; only reads disk if data is not in the cache.

✧ Direct I/O: Reads data directly from disk (not cache).

• Redundancy through:

— Configuration stored in non-volatile RAM and on the drives (COD).

— Hot-swap support.

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