Seagate ST373355SS Hot plugging the drive, 4 S.M.A.R.T, Controlling S.M.A.R.T, Performance impact

5.2.3Hot plugging the drive

When a disc is powered on by switching the power or hot plugged, the drive runs a self test before attempting to communicate on its’ interfaces. When the self test completes successfully, the drive initiates a Link Reset starting with OOB. An attached device should respond to the link reset. If the link reset attempt fails, or any time the drive looses sync, the drive initiated link reset. The drive will initiate link reset once per second but alternates between port A and B. Therefore each port will attempt a link reset once per 2 seconds assuming both ports are out of sync..

If the self-test fails, the does not respond to link reset on the failing port.

Note. It is the responsibility of the systems integrator to assure that no temperature, energy, voltage haz- ard, or ESD potential hazard is presented during the hot connect/disconnect operation. Discharge the static electricity from the drive carrier prior to inserting it into the system.

Caution. The drive motor must come to a complete stop prior to changing the plane of operation. This time is required to insure data integrity.

5.2.4S.M.A.R.T.

S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. This technology is intended to recognize conditions that indicate imminent drive failure and is designed to provide sufficient warning of a failure to allow you to back up the data before an actual failure occurs.

Note. The drive’s firmware monitors specific attributes for degradation over time but can’t predict instanta- neous drive failures.

Each monitored attribute has been selected to monitor a specific set of failure conditions in the operating per- formance of the drive and the thresholds are optimized to minimize “false” and “failed” predictions.

Controlling S.M.A.R.T.

The operating mode of S.M.A.R.T. is controlled by the DEXCPT and PERF bits on the Informational Exceptions Control mode page (1Ch). Use the DEXCPT bit to enable or disable the S.M.A.R.T. feature. Setting the DEX- CPT bit disables all S.M.A.R.T. functions. When enabled, S.M.A.R.T. collects on-line data as the drive performs normal read and write operations. When the PERF bit is set, the drive is considered to be in “On-line Mode Only” and will not perform off-line functions.

You can measure off-line attributes and force the drive to save the data by using the Rezero Unit command. Forcing S.M.A.R.T. resets the timer so that the next scheduled interrupt is in two hours.

You can interrogate the drive through the host to determine the time remaining before the next scheduled mea- surement and data logging process occurs. To accomplish this, issue a Log Sense command to log page 0x3E. This allows you to control when S.M.A.R.T. interruptions occur. Forcing S.M.A.R.T. with the RTZ command resets the timer.

Performance impact

S.M.A.R.T. attribute data is saved to the disc so that the events that caused a predictive failure can be recre- ated. The drive measures and saves parameters once every two hours subject to an idle period on the drive interfaces. The process of measuring off-line attribute data and saving data to the disc is uninterruptable. The maximum on-line only processing delay is summarized below:

Maximum processing delay
	On-line only delay	Fully-enabled delay
	DEXCPT = 0, PERF = 1	DEXCPT = 0, PERF = 0
S.M.A.R.T. delay times	42 milliseconds	163 milliseconds

Cheetah T10 SAS Product Manual, Rev. A 17