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Smart RAID provides active/active shared RAID support for PowerMax arrays. Smart RAID allows RAID groups to be shared between back-end directors within the same engine. Each back-end director has access to every hard drive within the DAE but each TDAT on that hard drive will be primary to only one back-end director.
Smart RAID helps in cost reduction by allowing a smaller number of RAID groups while improving performance by allowing two directors to run I/O concurrently to the same set of drives.
Figure 11 illustrates Smart RAID connectivity between directors, spindles, and TDATs.