Intel® Server Board S2600CW Family TPS
Intel® Server Board S2600CW Functional Architecture
Revision 2.4
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Using the <F2> BIOS Setup Utility, accessed during system POST, options are available to
enable/disable SW RAID, and select which embedded software RAID option to use.
In addition to the SATA SW RAID options, the Intel® Server Board S2600CW2SR/S2600CWTSR
supports Integrated MegaRaid RAID (IMR).
3.4.8.1
Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (RSTe) 4.0
Intel®
Rapid Storage Technology offers several diverse options for RAID (Redundant Array of
Independent Disks) to meet the needs of the end user. AHCI support provides higher
performance and alleviates disk bottlenecks by taking advantage of the independent DMA
engines that each SATA port offers in the chipset.
RAID Level 0
performance scaling up to 6 drives, enabling higher throughput for data
intensive applications such as video editing.
Data security is offered through
RAID Level 1
, which performs mirroring.
RAID Level 10
provides high levels of storage performance with data protection,
combining the fault-tolerance of RAID Level 1 with the performance of RAID Level 0. By
striping RAID Level 1 segments, high I/O rates can be achieved on systems that require
both performance and fault-tolerance. RAID Level 10 requires 4 hard drives, and
provides the capacity of two drives.
RAID Level 5
provides highly efficient storage while maintaining fault-tolerance on 3 or
more drives. By striping parity, and rotating it across all disks, fault tolerance of any
single drive is achieved while only consuming 1 drive worth of capacity. That is, a 3
drive RAID 5 has the capacity of 2 drives, or a 4 drive RAID 5 has the capacity of 3
drives. RAID 5 has high read transaction rates, with a medium write rate. RAID 5 is well
suited for applications that require high amounts of storage while maintaining fault
tolerance.
Note:
RAID configurations cannot span across the two embedded AHCI SATA controllers.
By using Intel® RSTe, there is no loss of PCI resources (request/grant pair) or add-in card slot.
Intel® RSTe functionality requires the following:
The SW-RAID option must be enabled in <F2> BIOS Setup
Intel® RSTe option must be selected in <F2> BIOS Setup
Intel® RSTe drivers must be loaded for the specified operating system
At least two SATA drives are needed to support RAID levels 0 or 1
At least three SATA drives are needed to support RAID levels 5 or 10
With Intel® RSTe SW-RAID enabled, the following features are made available:
A boot-time, pre-operating system environment, text mode user interface that allows
the user to manage the RAID configuration on the system. Its feature set is kept simple
to keep size to a minimum, but allows the user to create and delete RAID volumes and