Monitoring, Maintenance, and Troubleshooting Features

Several 3ware RAID controller features aid in monitoring and troubleshooting your drives.

SMART Monitoring (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting 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.)

Staggered Spinup allows drives that support this feature to be powered-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).

Verification and Media Scans. The verify task verifies all redundant 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. Bad sectors can be dynamically repaired through error 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. Initialize, rebuild, verify, and self-test 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. Write cache can be enabled or disabled using 3BM 2,
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 Battery Backup Unit (BBU) installed, the cache stored on the 3ware controller can be restored.

StorSave Profiles allow you to set the level of protection versus performance that is desired for a unit when write cache is enabled (9550SX and 9590SE controllers only). For more information, see Setting the StorSave Profile for a Unit.

Drive Locate. When the I2C port on the controller has been connected to a chassis with a Chassis Control Unit (CCU), you can issue drive locate commands that blink the LEDs for particular drives, so that you can quickly identify what drive needs to be checked or replaced (9550SX and 9590SE controllers only).

Auto-Rebuild. For times when you do not have a spare available, setting the auto-rebuild policy allows rebuilds to occur with an available drive or with a failed drive (9550SX and 9590SE controllers only).

Monitoring, Maintenance, and Troubleshooting Features

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