Monitoring, Maintenance, And Troubleshooting Features - 3Ware 9550SXU-16ML User Manual

Chapter 1. Introducing the 3ware® 9000 Series Controller
Monitoring, Maintenance, and
Troubleshooting Features
Several 3ware RAID controller features aid in monitoring and
troubleshooting your drives.
SMART Monitoring
Technology) automatically checks a disk drive's health every 24 hours
and reports potential problems. This allows you to take proactive steps to
prevent impending disk crashes. SMART data is checked on all disk
drives (array members, single disks, and hot spares). Monitoring of
SMART thresholds can be turned on and off in 3DM. (For details, see
"Viewing SMART Data About a Drive" on page 168.)
Staggered Spinup
up into the standby power management state to minimize in-rush current
at power-up and to allow the controller to sequence the spin-up of drives.
Both SATAII OOB and ATA spin-up methods are supported. The standby
power management state is persistent after power-down and power-up.
You can set the number of drives that will spin up at the same time, and
the time between staggers in 3BM (the 3ware BIOS Management utility).
For details, see "Enabling and Setting Up Staggered Spinup" on page 120.
Verification and Media Scans.
units, and checks for media errors on single disks, spares, JBODS and
RAID 0 unit members. If the disk drive is part of a redundant unit, error
locations that are found and are deemed repairable are rewritten with the
redundant data. This forces the drive firmware to reallocate the error
sectors accordingly.
Error Correction
correction (Dynamic Sector Repair). Reallocation of blocks will try to be
based intelligently on the location of the block in relation to the stripe.
Scheduled Background Tasks.
tasks can all be run in the background, at scheduled times. This lets you
choose a time for these tasks to be run when it will be least disruptive to
your system. You can also define the rate at which background tasks are
performed, specifying whether I/O tasks should be given more processing
time, or background rebuild and verify tasks should be given more
processing time.
Write Cache
3DM 2 and CLI. When write cache is enabled, data will be stored in
system cache, 3ware controller cache, and drive cache before the data is
committed to disk. This allows the system to process multiple write
commands at the same time, thus improving performance. However when
data is stored in cache, it could be lost if a power failure occurred. With a
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(Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting
allows drives that support this feature to be powered-
The verify task verifies all redundant
. Bad sectors can be dynamically repaired through error
Initialize, rebuild, verify, and self-test
. Write cache can be enabled or disabled using 3BM 2,
3ware 9550SX Serial ATA RAID Controller User Guide