Intel SRCSASBB8I - RAID Controller Hardware User's Manual
Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I
Hardware User’s Guide
Intel Order Number: E33166-001
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ii Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I Hardware User’s Guide
Preface
This is the primary hardware guide for the Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I, which
can be used for 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 Software User’s Guide on the Resource CD.
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 SRCSASBB8I storage
adapter for a system.
• Anyone installing an Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I storage adapter in a
RAID system.
Organization
This document includes the following chapters and appendixes:
• Chapter 1 provides a general overview of the Intel® RAID Controller
SRCSASBB8I.
• Chapter 2 describes the procedures for installing the RAID controller.
• Chapter 3 provides the characteristics and technical specifications for the Intel®
RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I.
• Appendix A explains drive roaming and how to do a drive migration.
Related Publication
The Software User’s Guide is on the Resource CD that ships with the RAID controller.
Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I Hardware User’s Guide iii
iv Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I Hardware User’s Guide
Contents
Preface ........................................................................................................................iii
Audience ............................................................................................................................... iii
Organization ......................................................................................................................... iii
Related Publication ............................................................................................................... iii
Chapter 1, Overview ................................................................................................... 1
Benefits of SAS ......................................................................................................................1
®
Intel
RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I ....................................................................................2
Protocol Support ............................................................................................................2
Operating System Support ............................................................................................2
Usability .........................................................................................................................2
Redundancy and Error Handling ...................................................................................3
SAS/SATA Features of the 1078 Controller ..................................................................4
Beep Codes ...................................................................................................................5
Chapter 2, Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I Hardware Installation ................ 7
Requirements ........................................................................................................................7
Install the RAID Controller .....................................................................................................7
Configure the RAID Controller .............................................................................................10
Replacing a Controller, Resolving a Config Mismatch .........................................................10
Chapter 3, Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I Characteristics ........................ 11
Technical Specifications ......................................................................................................12
Array Performance Features ...............................................................................................13
Fault Tolerance ............................................................................................................13
Electrical Characteristics .............................................................................................14
Safety Characteristics ..................................................................................................14
A. Drive Roaming and Drive Migration Install ........................................................ 15
Drive Roaming .....................................................................................................................15
Drive Migration .....................................................................................................................16
B. Installation / Assembly Safety Instructions ....................................................... 17
English .................................................................................................................................19
Deutsch ................................................................................................................................20
Français ...............................................................................................................................22
Español ................................................................................................................................23
Italiano .................................................................................................................................24
C. Regulatory and Certification Information .......................................................... 27
Electromagnetic Compatibility Notices ................................................................................29
Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I Hardware User’s Guide v
vi Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I Hardware User’s Guide
1 Overview
The Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I is a high-performance intelligent PCIExpress* SAS/SATA RAID controller that offers reliability, high performance, and faulttolerant 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 third generation PCI Express storage controller, the Intel
SRCSASBB8I addresses the demand for increased data throughput and scalability
requirements across entry level and midrange and enterprise server platforms.
The controller can be connected to up to eight drives directly and allows the use of
expanders to connect to additional drives. See the ANSI SAS standard, version 1.0
specification for more information about the use of expanders.
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
for the RAID controller, even during system failures.
RAID Smart Battery AXXRSBBU6 provides cached data protection
®
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 FC, 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 SRCSASBB8I Hardware User’s Guide 1
Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I
The Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I is an intelligent low-profile RAID adapter
with an integrated LSI* 1078 RAID-On-Chip chipset, providing both a SAS controller
and RAID engine. With 256 MB RAM built onto the board and eight independent ports
using two SFF-8087 mini multi-lane connectors, this controller supports up to 32
enterprise-class SAS or SATA devices and 64 logical drives. The PCI-Express* connector
fits into an x8 or x16 PCI-Express slot capable of 2.5 Gbps per lane over PCI Express* x4
with a 3.0 Gbps point to point transfer rate.
The SAS controller supports the ANSI Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) standard, version 1.0
and the Serial ATA (SATA) protocol defined by the Serial ATA specification, version 1.0a.
Protocol Support
• Serial SCSI Protocol (SSP): Communication with other SAS devices.
• SATA II Protocol: Communication with other SATA II devices.
• Serial Management Protocol (SMP): Topology management information sharing
with expanders.
• Serial Tunneling Protocol (STP) support for SATAII through expander interfaces.
Operating System Support
• Windows Server 2003*, Windows 2000* Enterprise Server, SP4 and Windows XP*.
• Red Hat* Enterprise Linux 3.0, 4.0, ad 5.0.
• SuSE* Linux Enterprise Server 9, SP1-3 and SLES 10.
The operating systems supported may not be supported by your server board. See the
tested operating system list for your server board at
http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/. See also the tested hardware and
operating system list for the Intel
RAID card supports your operating system.
Usability
• The card ships with both a standard and a low-profile bracket.
• Small, thin cabling with serial point-to-point 3.0 Gbps 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 (def), 128, 256, 512, or 1024 KB.
®
RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I to make sure the
2 Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I Hardware User’s Guide
• 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.
• 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.
Redundancy and Error Handling
• In-band and out-of-band SES2.
• Enclosure management support.
• Fault indicators per drive.
• 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.
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RAID Web
Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I Hardware User’s Guide 3
• 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 nonvolatile RAM and on the drives (COD).
— Hot-swap support.
— Optional battery backup for cache memory. Controller provides fast or trickle
charges.
SAS/SATA Features of the 1078 Controller
• Provides eight independent phys, each supporting 3.0 Gbps SATA data transfers.
• Scalable interface that supports up to 32 physical devices and 64 logical devices via
expanders.
• Supports SSP to enable communication with other SAS devices.
• Supports SMP to communicate topology management information.
• Supports single PHY or wide ports consisting of 2, 3, or 4 PHY within one quad
port.
• Allows addressing of multiple SATA targets through an expander if using SATA 2.0-
compliant hard disk drives.
• Allows multiple initiators to address a single target (in a fail-over configuration)
through an expander.
4 Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I Hardware User’s Guide
Online Capacity Expansion and RAID Level Migration Rules
• Migration must occur to the same or larger capacity configuration.
• Migration cannot occur if there is more than one virtual disk in a logical array.
• Migration and OCE cannot be done on Spanned Arrays (RAID 10, 50, 60).
• Migrations supported are : RAID 1 to RAID 0, RAID 5 to RAID 0, RAID 6 to RAID
0.
• With OCE migrations supported are RAID 0 to RAID 1, RAID 0 to RAID 5, RAID
1 to RAID 5.
Beep Codes
• Short beep, 1 second on, 1 second off. Array is degraded but no data lost.
• Long beep, 3 seconds on, 1 second off. Array has failed. Data has been lost.
• Short beep, 1 second on, 3 seconds off. Using hot spare in rebuild. Alarm will
continue during rebuild with a different sound at completion.
To disable the alarm, choose Disable Alarm. To enable alarm, choose Enable Alarm
To disable alarm only until the next event or until next power cycle, choose Silence
Alarm.
Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASBB8I Hardware User’s Guide 5
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