Physical Drive in Symmetrix/DMX

Hi,

Physical drive is the actual drive over which LUNs are created with RAID protection.

The Symmetrix DMX-4 uses industry-standard 2 Gb/s and 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel disk drives for physical drives. The disk drives are installed in the front of storage bays and connect to a midplane. Each disk drive is integrated with a dual-port Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) controller with Fibre Channel interface that transports SCSI protocol.

The Symmetrix DMX-4 supports Fibre Channel loops ranging from 15 drives to 60 drives per loop. The DMX-4 series uses point-to-point connection to each drive in the drive enclosure. This allows access, diagnosis, and isolation of individual drives during corrective action. It also allows individual drives to be targeted for online testing during power up and replacement and when adding new capacity. The point-to-point drive connection capability enables more precise back-end fault recovery.

Please find the attached document about DMX-4 disk drive features.

Thank you

Sanjit Kumar Achary