3Ware 8006-2LP - Escalade RAID Controller, Manual

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Introduction
8 3ware Escalade ATA RAID Controller User Guide
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SMTP support for email/pager notification of events
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Easy-to-configure arrays from BIOS or CLI
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BIOS supports booting from the array
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Multiple logical volumes and RAID levels can exist on one card
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Multiple card support within a system for very large storage requirements
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Hot swap and hot spare support for data availability
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Dynamic sector repair for robust data protection
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S.M.A.R.T. disk drive monitoring for reliability
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R5 Fusion technology for accelerated RAID 5 writes (only available on
7500, 7506, 8500 and 8506 models)
Escalade Serial ATA Controller
The Escalade 8000 series of Serial ATA RAID cards are the most advanced
controllers available, supporting from 2 to 12 Serial ATA drives. These cards
provide the highest level of RAID 5 performance and scalability, traditionally
seen only with a SCSI array. Based on 3ware's 4th generation network
switched architecture, the 8000 series are the only Serial ATA controllers that
unleash the point-to-point performance benefits of Serial ATA.
Teamed with a mature suite of software and firmware management tools, the
Escalade 8000 series of RAID controllers provide a powerful, affordable
alternative to SCSI.
RAID increases performance and adds redundancy
Escalade ATA RAID Controllers use a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
(RAID) to increase your storage system’s performance and provide fault
tolerance. The ATA RAID Controllers offer RAID 0 variable striped arrays
for performance; RAID 1 mirrored arrays for fault tolerance; variable striped
mirrored RAID 10 arrays for fault tolerance and performance; and RAID 5
arrays for fault tolerance, high capacity and storage efficiency.
RAID 0 arrays maximize performance and capacity
When drives are configured in a striped disk array (see Figure 1), the Escalade
ATA RAID Controller distributes large files across the multiple disks using
RAID 0 techniques. Striped disk arrays achieve high transfer rates because
they can read or write data on more than one drive simultaneously. Striped
disk arrays give exceptional performance, particularly for data intensive
applications such as video editing, computer aided design and geographical
information systems. Striping your disk array concatenates each drive’s
capacity into one large volume. The stripe size is user configurable at 64K,
128K, 256K, 512K or 1M.