Logical Drive Administration


Logical Drive Administration

See > ServeRAID System Board Controller - Setup

Use the following information to create logical drives, initialize and synchronizing logical drives, or access blocked logical drives.

Creating Logical Drives:

  Each ServeRAID adapter or controller supports a maximum
of 8 logical drives. Depending upon the stripe-unit size being used, you can combine a maximum of 8 or 16 physical drives into each logical drive.

To create a logical drive:

  1. Click on the   icon on the Tool Bar or select
    Manage Logical Drive from the Advanced pull-down menu, then, select Create Logical Drive.  A screen similar to the following appears.

     
  2.  Select the desired disk array ID from the pull-down list.
  3.  Select the appropriate RAID level from the pull-down list.

    NOTE: The number of hard disk drives in the array determines the RAID levels available for the array.

  4.  Enter the Requested Space in the entry field.
     The ServeRAID program uses the maximum available space for the selected RAID level to calculate the  default value that it assigns.

    NOTE: The actual logical drive size may be slightly different from what you type in the Requested Space field. The RAID level and the number of hard disk drives determine the size of the  logical drive.
     For example, a disk array consisting of three, 1 GB hard disk drives with a requested  RAID level-0 logical drive of 1000 MB will actually contain only 999 MB because the data is striped  across all three drives, with 333 MB on each drive.

  5.  Click on OK to create the logical drive.

    NOTE:

     1. If you plan to use the Logical Drive Migration (LDM) feature, do not define more than seven  logical drives. The LDM feature requires one free logical drive to perform the migration. Refer  to 'Logical Drive Migration Administration' for more information.
     2. If you plan to use the Change RAID Level function of the LDM feature, you must assign the  same RAID level to all logical drives within a single disk array.  Refer to 'Change RAID Levels' for more information.

Initializing Logical Drives: Initializing a logical drive erases the first 1024 sectors on the drive and prevents access to any data previously stored on the drive.

To initialize a logical drive:

  1.  Select the desired logical drive from the Main screen  of the Administration and Monitoring Program.
  2.  Click on Initialize to initialize the drive.
  3.  If you have initialized a RAID level-5 drive, you must  synchronize to ensure data integrity. See (below) 'Synchronizing Logical Drives.'


Synchronizing Logical Drives: The purpose of synchronizing logical drives is to compute and write the parity data on the selected drives.

If the type of ServeRAID adapter or controller you are using does not support the auto-synchronization and data-scrubbing features, manually synchronize your RAID level-1 and RAID level-5 logical drives weekly. This does not alter data on the drive.

Synchronizing a logical drive verifies that the data redundancy for the logical drive is correct.

To synchronize a logical drive:

  1.  Select the desired logical drive from the Main screen of the Administration and Monitoring Program.
  2.  Click on Synchronize to synchronize the drive.
  3.  The synchronization begins automatically and reports progress information on the screen.

 

NOTE: Only one synchronization command can be active at a time.


Unblocking Logical Drives: When the ServeRAID adapter or controller performs a Rebuild operation on an array, it reconstructs the data that was stored in RAID level-1 and RAID level-5 logical drives.
However, the ServeRAID adapter or controller cannot reconstruct the data that was stored in any RAID level-0 logical drives in that array. The data in the RAID level-0 logical drives is blocked when the ServeRAID adapter or controller detects that the array is valid, but the data might be damaged.

After the Rebuild operation completes, you can unblock the RAID level-0 logical drives and access them once again. But remember, the logical drive might contain damaged data. You must either re-create, install, or restore the data from the most recent backup disk or tape.

To unblock a blocked drive:

  1.  Select the blocked logical drive from the Main screen of the Administration and Monitoring Program.
  2.  Click on Unblock to unblock the drive.
  3.  Initialize all unblocked logical drives before using  them. See (above) 'Initializing Logical Drives'.
  4.  Restore the data to the drive from your most recent backup disk or tape.


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