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This is the primary hardware guide for the Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASJV, 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 a Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASJV storage adapter
into a system
•Anyone installing a Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASJV storage adapter in their
RAID system
Organization
This document includes the following chapters and appendixes:
•Chapter 1 provides a general overview of the Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASJV.
•Chapter 2 describes the procedures for installing the RAID controller.
•Chapter 3 provides the characteristics and technical specifications for the Intel®
RAID Controller SRCSASJV.
•Appendix A explains drive roaming and how to do a drive migration.
Related Publication
The Software User’s Guide on the Resource CD that is included with the RAID controller.
The Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASJV is a high-performance intelligent PCI-Express*
SAS/SATA RAID controller that offers reliability, high performance, and fault-tolerant
disk subsystem management. This is a RAID solution that meets the internal and external
storage needs of workgroup, department, or enterprise systems that use cost-effective
SATA or high performance SAS media.
As a third generation PCI Express storage controller, the Intel
SRCSASJV 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.
®
An optional Intel
RAID controller, even during system failures.
RAID backup battery unit can provide cached data protection for the
®
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.
The Intel® RAID Controller SRCSASJV is an intelligent low-profile RAID adapter with
an integrated LSI* 1078 RAID-On-Chip chipset, providing both a SAS controller and
RAID engine. The controller ships with 512 MB RAM in a mini-DIMM slot that supports
DDR2 667 MHz ECC SDRAM. Eight independent ports are available, using any two of
the mini SAS 4i multi-lane connectors, this controller supports up to 240 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* x8 with a 3 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 SATA II 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, and 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 RAID Controller SRCSASJV to make sure the 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 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.
•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.
•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
—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 Gbps SATA data transfers.
•Scalable interface that supports up to 240 physical devices and 64 logical drives 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 II
compliant hard disk drives.
•Allows multiple initiators to address a single target (in a fail-over configuration).
•A host system with an available x8 or x16 PCI-Express* slot.
•The Resource CD, which contains drivers and documentation.
•SAS or SATA 3 GB hard drives.
Note: Intel Corporation strongly recommends using an uninterruptible power supply (UPS).
®
RAID Controller SRCSASJV, with the provided cables.
Install the RAID Controller
1. Turn off the power to the system and all drives, enclosures, and system
components. Remove the power cord(s).
2. Follow the instructions that came with your server system to remove the server
cover.
3. If necessary, change the bracket on the RAID controller to fit the height of the
server system. See the following figure.
4. Install the RAID controller into an available server system x8 or x16 PCI-Express*
slot. See your server system documentation to locate an appropriate slot and for
instructions on installing an add-in card. See also the following figure.