Chapter 1 DPM5500 System Description
Supported RAID Configurations
Quantum DPM5500 User’s Guide
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RAID Sets
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The DPM5500 system is divided into RAID sets. The DPM5500 system
can contain up to four RAID sets (two per array controller):
Array Controller 1 (drive sleds 0 through 11)
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• The first RAID set is made up of the first six drive sleds (drive sleds 0-
4 including the parity drive with drive 5 as a hot spare).
• The second RAID set is made up of the next six drive sleds (drive
sleds 6-11 including the parity drive).
Array Controller 2 (drive sleds 0 through 11)
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• The third RAID set is made up of the next six drive sleds (drive sleds
0-4 including the parity drive with drive 5 as a hot spare).
• The fourth RAID set is made up of the next six drive sleds (drive
sleds 6-11 including the parity drive).
Each RAID set can sustain a single hard drive failure.
Supported RAID Configurations
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RAID is short for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive)
Disks, which is a category of hard disk drives that employ two or more
drives in combination for fault tolerance and performance. There are a
number of RAID levels in use today such as 0, 1, 3, 5, and 10.
The DPM5500 system support RAID 5 with hot spare configurations.
RAID 5 Configuration
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The RAID 5 configuration is the most common RAID level in use today.
RAID 5 minimizes the write bottlenecks of other RAID levels by
distributing parity stripes over a series of hard drives. In doing so it
provides relief to the concentration of write activity on a single drive,
which in turn enhances overall system performance. Instead of allowing
any one drive in the array to assume the risk of a bottleneck, all of the
drives in the array assume write activity responsibilities. The distribution