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Spanning

Disk spanning makes use of the firmware's striping capability to stripe data across two otherwise independent RAID logical drives. The two spanned logical drives are presented to the OS as one logical drive. Advantages of spanning include:

  • Spanning can support two simultaneous drive failures in the combined fault tolerant logical drives (provided there is one drive failure from each logical drive).
  • Spanning improves performance because the number of spindles is increased.

The disadvantage of spanning is that the RAID overhead for redundant RAID levels is increased because each logical drive handles fault tolerance separately.

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