You may include from one to thirty-two drives in the unit, depending on the number of drives available and the model of the controller you have. (For information about how many drives to select for a given RAID level, see
Determining What RAID Level to Use.)
Available drives are those that are not currently part of a unit. If you want to use drives that are currently part of a different unit, you must first delete that unit to make the drives available. (For details, see
Deleting a Unit.) If drives are listed under “Incomplete Drives and Others,” they must be deleted before they can be used.
Using the default stripe size of 64KB usually gives you the best performance for mixed I/Os. If your application has some specific I/O pattern (purely sequential or purely random), you might want to experiment with a smaller or larger stripe size.
When you create a unit through 3BM or CLI, you can create a special volume to function as the boot volume. This is useful if you will be installing an operating system onto the unit, and want it to be installed in one volume and have a separate volume for data.
If you are creating a very large unit and have enabled the Auto-Carving policy, the boot volume will be created in addition to any volumes created through auto-carving. For more information about auto-carving, see
Using Auto-Carving for Multi LUN Support.
When you create a unit through CLI, you have the option of creating up to four volumes with variable, defined sizes. If you have enabled the Auto-Carving policy, these units will be created first, and then the carve size will be used to segment the remaining drive space into additional volumes. For details, see the /c
x add command in the
3ware SAS/SATA RAID Controller CLI Guide.
In 3BM, you can choose to do a foreground (default) or background initialization of the unit. 3DM and CLI can only use background initialization when creating a unit.
If your unit starts a foreground initialization and you want to use it immediately, you can press
Esc and the unit will switch to using background initialization.