User guide

Chapter 1. Introducing the 3ware® SATA RAID Controller
14 3ware Serial ATA RAID Controller User Guide
For details about working with 3DM, see “3DM 2 (3ware Disk Manager)
Introduction” on page 66.
3DM 2 is the current version of the 3ware Disk Manager. Throughout this
documentation, it is referred to interchangeably as 3DM and 3DM 2.
• 3ware Alert Utility (WinAVAlarm)
The 3ware Alert Utility for Windows runs on the system in which the
3ware RAID controller is installed and provides direct notification by
popup message and audio alarm when events occur. This utility can be
configured to specify the type of events that should generate these
notifications. For details, see “Using the Alert Utility Under Windows” on
page 139.
• 3ware CLI (Command Line Interface)
The 3ware CLI provides the functionality available in 3DM through a
Command Line Interface. You can view unit status and version
information and perform maintenance functions such as adding or
removing drives, and reconfiguring RAID units online. You can also use
it to remotely administer controllers in a system.
The 3ware CLI is described in 3ware Serial ATA RAID Controller CLI
Guide and in the 3ware HTML Bookshelf.
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 141.)
•
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).
For details, see “Enabling and Setting Up Staggered Spin-up” on page 89.
•
Verification and Media Scans. The verify task verifies all redundant
units, and checks for media errors on single disks, spares, JBODS and