Auto-resume uses non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) to save rebuild progress during a host reboot or power failure to automatically resume from the last checkpoint. Auto-resume ensures that data integrity is maintained through the process. The card supports a number of features that are able to be implemented without rebooting the server. Applications, such as email and web server, benefit from avoiding downtime during transition.

Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) allows the capacity of a virtual disk to be expanded by adding new physical disks or making use of unused space on existing disks, without requiring a reboot.

Online RAID Level Migration (also known as logical drive migration) provides the ability to migrate a virtual disk from any RAID level to any other RAID level without requiring a reboot. System availability and application functionality remain unaffected.

Fast initialization quickly writes zeroes to the first and last sectors of the virtual drive. This feature allows you to immediately start writing data to the virtual drive while the initialization is running in the background.

Consistency check verifies that all stripes in a virtual disk with a redundant RAID level are consistent. The consistency check will mirror data when an inconsistent stripe is detected for a RAID 1 and will recreate the parity from the peer disks in the case of a RAID 5. Consistency checks can be scheduled to take place periodically.

Management tools provide convenience for the configuration of logical volumes and alerting when errors have occurred or are about to occur.

Patrol read is a background sentry service designed to proactively discover and correct media defects (bad sectors) that arise normally as a disk drive ages. The service issues a series of verify commands, and if a bad block is discovered, the card's firmware uses RAID algorithms to recreate the missing data and remap the sector to a good sector. The task is interruptible based on controller activity and host operations. The firmware also provides an interface where the patrol read task can be initiated, set up for continuous operation, and terminated from a management application. Patrol read can be activated by manual command or automatically.

A hot spare rebuilds data from all virtual disks within the disk group in which it is configured. ServeRAID provides the ability to define a physical disk as a hot spare to replace a failed drive. Hot spares can be configured as either global or dedicated. A global hot spare allows any physical drive to be designated as a hot spare. A dedicated hot spare allows the user to assign a hot spare drive to a particular array of the same drive type.

The ServeRAID's firmware detects and uses multiple paths from the controllers to the SAS drives that are in enclosures. With redundant paths to the same port of a device, if one path fails, another path can be used to communicate between the controller and the drive. Using multiple paths with load balancing, instead of a single path, can increase reliability through redundancy.

WebBIOS and HII are utilities that allow you to configure drive groups and logical drives before installing or booting the operating system.

MegaRAID Storage Manager is an easy-to-use advanced RAID management application that is used across the entire family of ServeRAID M controllers. It allows you to configure, monitor, and maintain drive groups, virtual drives, and advanced features with an intuitive GUI, reducing administrative efforts and simplifying troubleshooting.

MegaRAID SafeStore encryption services offer instant secure erase and local key management for self-encrypting drives. Instant secure erase permanently removes data when repurposing or decommissioning SEDs. SafeStore local key management provides the necessary management and protection of SEDs using a simple pass phrase, security key identifier, and security key file that can be set and applied to all SEDs assigned to a ServeRAID adapter. This feature removes the complexity of managing each SED’s unique encryption key, and essentially, it relieves the administrator of most of the daily tasks of securing data. The SafeStore feature is a part of a RAID 5 upgrade (81Y4542).