Viewing and Seting Controller Policies

The following controller-wide policies can be adjusted as appropriate for your equipment.

Auto-Rebuild. Determines whether the Auto-Rebuild policy is enabled or disabled. When disabled, degraded units can only be rebuilt with designated spares. When enabled, the controller firmware will attempt to rebuild a degraded unit if there is no spare, using either an available drive or a failed drive. Applies only to 9550SX and 9590SE controllers.

Auto-Carving. Determines whether the auto-carving policy is enabled or disabled. When it is enabled, any unit larger than a specified size (known as the carve size) is created as multiple volumes that can be addressed by the operating system as separate volumes. The default carve size is 2 TB.

This auto-carving feature is sometimes referred to as multi-LUN, where each volume that is created is referred to as a "LUN."

Carve Size. (Referred to as Carving Factor in 3BM) Sets a size for dividing up units into volumes when Auto-Carving is enabled. This setting can be between 1024 and 2048 GB.

Staggered spin-up. Spin-up allows drives 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. Compatible drives are sent a spin up command as defined by the Number of drives per spin-up and Delay between spin-up settings. These policies can only be set in 3BM and CLI.

Number of drives per spin-up. Number of drives that will spin up at the same time when the controller is powered up, if staggered spin-up is enabled. From 1 to x, depending on the number of ports on the controller.

Delay between spin-up. The delay time (in seconds) between drive groups that spin up at one time on this particular controller, if staggered spin-up is enabled.

Export JBOD (unconfigured) disks. This setting indicates whether JBOD disks should be exported to the operating system. JBOD configuration is strongly discouraged for newly added disks on the 9000 series controller, in favor of Single Disk, so by default, this setting is disabled. If you have a JBOD configuration from a 7000/8000 controller that you want to use on the 9000 controller, you should enable this setting. This policy can only be set in 3BM and CLI. For details, see the 3ware Serial ATA RAID Controller User Guide.

Disable write cache on degraded array. For 9500S controllers, indicates whether write cache will be automatically disabled on a unit if it becomes degraded. (This option does not apply to 9550SX and 9590SE controllers; the feature is integrated into the StorSave policy.)

When Yes, the unit write cache and the disk drive write cache will be disabled if the unit degrades. This setting has no effect on non-redundant arrays. Write cache will be automatically re-enabled when the unit returns to normal.

When No, the unit and disk drive write cache will remain enabled (if it is enabled), in the event that the unit degrades.

This policy can only be set in 3BM and CLI. For details, see the 3ware Serial ATA RAID Controller User Guide.

Staggered method. Indicates whether the type of staggered spin-up is ATA-6 or SATA OOB (Out Of Band). By default, when Staggered Spin-up is enabled, the ATA-6 scheme is used. If your drives support the SATA OOB method, select that method in 3BM. There is no electronic method for the controller to know if a drive supports this method, so it must be set manually. For staggering to work properly, the drives must support the selected method. This policy can only be set and only shows in 3BM. For details, see the 3ware Serial ATA RAID Controller User Guide.

Some additional policies can be set at the unit level. For more information, see Configuring Units.

Viewing and Seting Controller Policies

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