Intel® Server Board S2600WF Product Family Technical Product Specification
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Figure 44. BIOS setup Mass Storage Controller Configuration screen
6.3.6.1
Intel® Rapid Storage Technology Enterprise (Intel® RSTe) 5.0 for SATA
Intel RSTe offers several options for RAID 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. Supported RAID levels include 0, 1, 5, and 10.
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RAID 0 – Uses striping to provide high data throughput, especially for large files in an environment
that does not require fault tolerance.
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RAID 1 – Uses mirroring so that data written to one disk drive simultaneously writes to another disk
drive. This is good for small databases or other applications that require small capacity but complete
data redundancy.
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RAID 5 – Uses disk striping and parity data across all drives (distributed parity) to provide high data
throughput, especially for small random access.
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RAID 10 – A combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1, consists of striped data across mirrored spans. It pro-
vides high data throughput and complete data redundancy but uses a larger number of spans.
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:
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The embedded RAID option must be enabled in BIOS setup.
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Intel RSTe option must be selected in BIOS setup.
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Intel RSTe drivers must be loaded for the installed operating system.
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At least two SATA drives needed to support RAID levels 0 or 1.
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At least three SATA drives needed to support RAID level 5.
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At least four SATA drives needed to support RAID level 10.
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NVMe SSDs and SATA drives must not be mixed within a single RAID volume
With Intel RSTe software RAID enabled, the following features are made available:
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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 mini-
mum, but allows the user to create and delete RAID volumes and select recovery options when prob-
lems occur. The user interface can be accessed by pressing <CTRL-I> during system POST.
