AMCC 720-0138-00 manual Monitoring, Maintenance, Troubleshooting Features

Chapter 2. Introducing the 3ware® 9590SE-4ME RAID Controller

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” on page 67.)

•Verification. The verify task verifies all redundant units, and checks for media errors on single disks, spares, 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. (For more information, see “About Verification” on page 70.)

•Error Correction. Bad sectors can be dynamically repaired through error correction (Dynamic Sector Repair). Reallocation of blocks is 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. (For more information, see “Scheduling Background Tasks” on page 76.)

•Write Cache. Write cache can be enabled or disabled using 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. A UPS (uninterruptable power supply) is recommended when using write cache. (For more information, see “Enabling and Disabling the Unit Write Cache” on page 45.)

•StorSave Profiles allow you to set the level of protection versus performance that is desired for a unit when write cache is enabled (For more information, see “Setting the StorSave Profile for a Unit” on page 48.)

12 3ware Serial ATA RAID Controller User Guide for the Power Mac G5