Dell PowerEdge H730P, User Manual

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Source RAID
Level
Target RAID
Level
Number of
Physical Disks
(Beginning)
Number of
Physical Disks
(End)
Capacity
Expansion
Possible
Description
RAID 5 RAID 5 3 or more 4 or more Yes Increases
capacity by
adding disks.
RAID 5 RAID 6 3 or more 4 or more Yes At least one
disk needs to
be added for
dual distributed
parity data.
RAID 6 RAID 0 4 or more 4 or more Yes Converts to a
non-redundant
virtual disk and
reclaims disk
space used for
distributed
parity data.
RAID 6 RAID 5 4 or more 4 or more Yes Removes one
set of parity
data and
reclaims disk
space used for
it.
RAID 6 RAID 6 4 or more 5 or more Yes Increases
capacity by
adding disks
NOTE: The total number of physical disks in a disk group cannot exceed 32. You cannot perform
RAID level migration and expansion on RAID levels 10, 50, and 60.
Fault Tolerance
The PERC H730P card supports the following:
• Self Monitoring and Reporting Technology (SMART)
• Patrol Read
• Physical disk failure detection
• Physical disk rebuild using hot spares
• Controller cache preservation
• Battery and non-volatile cache backup of controller cache to protect data
• Detection of batteries with low charge after boot up
The next sections describe some methods to achieve fault tolerance.
The SMART Feature
The SMART feature monitors certain physical aspects of all motors, heads, and physical disk electronics
to help detect predictable physical disk failures. Data on SMART-compliant physical disks can be
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