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The raid controller and drives seem to support T10-PI Data Protection information ('Type2'). It is currently disabled on the controller, and the MSM Ui doesn't show an option to enable it, but it is there in StorCLI.exe.

Let's say I enabled this controller setting (StorCLI /c0 set pi enable=on). What would this do?
A: All new VDs will have PI, existing ones need to be recreated.
B: All existing VDs transparently convert from 512b to 520b in the background.
C: All VDs begin reinitializng and all exisitng data is lost.

I'm asking because I could not find any info in the StorCLI documentation about how this actually works, and would like to avoid a potential outage and complete data loss (C). And if (A) is the case, I would need to re-do the arrays from the boot environment and then re-image the OS.

Extra question: is it still worthwhile to enable this if the protection is not end-to-end? There are no applications that use it and I don't know if the windows driver adds PI to IO/DMA requests.

EDIT: I tried issuing the enable command to the controller.
Status = Failure, ErrMsg = endCtlrPropUpdate failed, ErrCd = 3.
So either the controller doesn't support it, or, it can't be turned on directly like this for some reason, but instead turns itself on when the first VD with PI is created.

theultramage
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1 Answers1

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T10 can be enabled at the creation of virtual disks.

You can use the Advanced Wizard to create a virtual disk, at which point you can enable T10 PI by selecting the option from the Select Virtual Disk Type drop-down list.

Overmind
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  • I just checked and it's not there. Could be that the UI is hiding it since StorCLI reports that PI is turned off. It's further complicated by the fact that in StorCLI, "pi" can only be enabled/disabled for the controller itself, not individual drives. However, there is a 'pi' option during VD creation. So it appears that it needs to be enabled on the controller first. I tried enabling it. I appended the results to my main post. – theultramage Feb 15 '19 at 12:11
  • Please check the official documentation what ErrCd = 3 is. It's not normal for that to happen. – Overmind Feb 19 '19 at 13:40