K2 Summit 3G internal storage system

The storage system on an internal storage second generation K2 Summit system includes the following:

mSATA — The mSATA SSD boot media on the front interconnect board serves as the system drive. The Windows operating system, applications, and other standard computer software components reside on the system drive.

RAID drives — There are slots for twenty-four 2.5 inch, or twelve 3.5 inch RAID drives, located behind the front bezel assembly in the front of the unit. These drives are for media storage. Media data is written across all of the drives, except for one drive (used for recovery). This media group appears as the V: drive to the Windows operating system.

Disk controller board — The disk controller board provides the RAID functionality for the internal disks. It is mounted vertically in the front of the unit. K2 Summit 3G systems with direct-connect storage or shared SAN storage do not contain a disk controller board, as RAID disks are in the external RAID storage devices.

RAID 5 – Drives configured as RAID 5 require that the equivalent of the space in one drive be dedicated for storing parity stripes. It requires that all of the drives but one be present to operate. The data is distributed across all of the drives. Upon failure of a single drive, subsequent reads can be calculated from the distributed parity so that no data is lost.

With RAID 5, data and parity (which is additional data used for recovery) are striped across three or more disks. If a disk gets an error or starts to fail, data is recreated from this distributed data and parity block— seamlessly and automatically. Essentially, the system is still operational even when one disk fails and until you can replace the failed drive. Another benefit of RAID 5 is that it allows the drives to be "hot-swappable." This means in case a drive in the array fails, that drive can be swapped with a new drive without shutting down the server and without having to interrupt users who may be accessing the server. It's a good solution for fault tolerance because as drives fail , the data can be rebuilt to new disks as failing disks are replaced.

RAID 1 — Drives configured as RAID 1 provide redundancy. The two disks in a RAID 1 LUN are redundant partners. Any single disk in a LUN can fail and disk access can continue. When a disk fails, error messages in the AppCenter StatusPane inform you of the problem. You can then replace the failed disk. The data is rebuilt on the replacement disk and redundancy is restored.

RAID 0 — Media drives configured as RAID 0 offer no redundancy. If any single RAID 0 media drive fails, all data is lost on all media drives.