Physical Disk Power Management; Using The Smart Feature - Dell PowerEdge RAID H700 User Manual

Physical Disk Power Management

The PERC H700 and H800 cards can be configured to spin down certain hard
drives after a set amount of time of inactivity to conserve power. This
power-savings feature is disabled by default and can be enabled in the Dell
OpenManage storage management application.
The power-savings feature can be enabled so that unconfigured disks, hot
spares, or both are spun down. The amount of time to wait to spin down these
disks can also be set. The minimum amount of time to wait that can be set is
30 minutes and the maximum is 1 day. The default is 30 minutes.
Disks that are spun down automatically, spin up when they are needed for
use. When a system is rebooted, all disks spin up.

Using the SMART Feature

The Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (SMART) feature
monitors the internal performance of all motors, heads, and physical disk
electronics to detect predictable physical disk failures. The SMART feature
helps monitor physical disk performance and reliability. SMART-compliant
physical disks have attributes for which data can be monitored to identify
changes in values and determine whether the values are within threshold
limits. Many mechanical and electrical failures display some degradation in
performance before failure.
A SMART failure is also referred to as a predicted failure. There are numerous
factors that relate to predicted physical disk failures, such as a bearing failure,
a broken read/write head, and changes in spin-up rate. In addition, there are
factors related to read/write surface failure, such as seek error rate and
excessive bad sectors. For information on physical disk status, see "Disk
Roaming" on page 26.
NOTE:
For detailed information on SCSI interface specifications, see t10.org
and for detailed information on SATA interface specifications, see t13.org.
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Storage Controller Features