Penguin Computing Relion 1900e, Technical Manual

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Relion 1900e/2900e Manual
Revision 1.0 42
Feature Description
AHCI / RAID
Disabled
AHCI / RAID
Enabled
Command Completion Coalescing
Reduces interrupt and completion overhead by
allowing a specified number of commands to
complete and then generating an interrupt to
process the commands
Supported N/A
5.5.1 Staggered Disk Spin-Up
Because of the high density of disk drives that can be attached to the C612 Onboard AHCI SATA Controller
and the sSATA Contoller, the combined startup power demand surge for all drives at once can be much
higher than the normal running power requirements and could require a much larger power supply for
startup than for normal operations.
In order to mitigate this and lessen the peak power demand during system startup, both the AHCI SATA
Controller and the sSATA Controller implement a Staggered Spin-Up capability for the attached drives. This
means that the drives are started up separately, with a certain delay between disk drives starting.
For the Onboard SATA Controller, Staggered Spin-Up is an option – AHCI HDD Staggered Spin-Up – in the
Setup Mass Storage Controller Configuration screen found in the <F2> BIOS Setup Utility.
5.6 Embedded SATA SW-RAID support
The server board has embedded support for two SATA SW-RAID options:

Intel
®
Rapid Storage Technology (RSTe) 4.1

Intel ® Embedded Server RAID Technology 2 (ESRT2) based on AVAGO* MegaRAID SW RAID
technology 1.41
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.
Note : RAID partitions created using either RSTe or ESRT2 cannot span across the two embedded SATA
controllers. Only drives attached to a common SATA controller can be included in a RAID partition.
5.6.1 Intel ® Rapid Storage Technology (RSTe) 4.1
Intel ® Rapid Storage Technology offers several 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 – Non-redundant striping of drive volumes with performance scaling of 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