Dell Shared PowerEdge RAID Controller 8 Cards For Dell PowerEdge VRTX Systems User’s Guide

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Specifications of a Shared PERC 8 card

The characteristics of a Shared PERC 8 card are as follows:

Table 1. Shared PERC 8 card specifications . This table describes the Shared PERC 8 card specifications.
Specification	Description
Supported drives	Dell-qualified SAS hard drives, SAS solid-state drives (SSDs), and Self-Encrypting Disks (SEDs) drives. Mixing disks of different speeds (7,200 rpm, 10,000 rpm, or 15,000 rpm) and bandwidth (6 Gbps or higher) while maintaining the same drive type (SAS) and technology (HDD or SSD) is supported. However, this may affect data transfer performance. NOTE: Though drives of bandwidth higher than 6 Gbps are supported, drives only run at a maximum speed of 6 Gbps. NOTE: Mixing HDDs and SSDs within a virtual disk is not supported. SATA drives are not supported.
RAID levels	0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, and 60 NOTE: Non-RAID drives are not supported.
Virtual functions	Four virtual functions to support up to four host servers
Management application	Dell Chassis Management Controller (CMC). NOTE: Option ROM (OP-ROM) is not supported. Booting from a shared storage is not supported. You can only boot from the storage on the server module.
Enclosure per external domain	2
Processor	Dell Adapter SAS RAID-on-Chip, 8 Port with LSI 2208 chipset
Battery backup unit	Yes
Nonvolatile cache	Yes
Cache memory	1 GB DDR3, 1333 MHz
Cache policies	Write Back, Forced Write-Back, Write Through, Adaptive Read-Ahead, No Read-Ahead, and Read Ahead NOTE: Write-back caching in a dual controller configuration is not supported on firmware 23.8.10-0061 and earlier versions. For the Shared PERC 8 card to support write-back feature, ensure that you download the updated firmware and driver version available at Dell.com/support/home. NOTE: For more information, see the Dell PowerEdge VRTX Storage Subsystem Compatibility Matrix at Dell.com/support/home.
Maximum number of spans per disk group	8
Maximum number of virtual disks per disk group	16
Maximum number of virtual disks	64
Dedicated and global hot spares	Yes
Hot swappable devices supported	Yes
Hardware XOR engine	Yes
Virtual disk initialization; background, full, and fast	Yes
Consistency check	Yes
Disk roaming	Yes
FastPath	Yes
Virtual disk migration between two Shared PERC 8 cards	Yes NOTE: The target Shared PERC 8 card firmware level must be either higher or equal to the source Shared PERC 8 card firmware level.
Virtual disk migration from PERC H310, H710, or H710P cards to a Shared PERC 8 card	No
SMART detection	Yes
Patrol Read	Yes
Automatic replace member	Yes
SAS (HDD/SSD) hard drive	Yes
Physical disk power management	IDLE-C for compliant HDDs only. No support for balanced, maximum, and customized power savings.
SATA (HDD/SSD) hard drive	No
Manual replace member	No
Online capacity expansion	No
Cachecade	No
Local Key Management (LKM)	Yes
PCIe hot plug of controller	PCIe Hot Add only supported with Shared PERC 8 External card
Multipath support	Required for systems with Fault Tolerant Shared PERC 8 card configuration.
Controller failover	Available only for systems with Fault Tolerant Shared PERC 8 card configuration.