User guide

Chapter 7. Configuring Your Controller
82 3ware Serial ATA RAID Controller User Guide
To see information about a controller in 3BM (BIOS)
1 Power up or reboot your system.
2 While the system is starting, watch for a screen showing information
about the controller and units you want to work with.
When you have more than one controller installed, information about
each one will be shown, sequentially.
3 Press
Alt-3 to bring up the 3ware BIOS Manager (3BM).
4
Tab to Information and press Enter.
5 On the pop-up menu, select
Controller and press Enter.
The Controller Information page displays.
About Controller Policies
The following policies affect all units and drives on a controller and can be
adjusted as appropriate for your equipment. Controller policies are shown at
the bottom of the Controller Settings page in 3DM (Figure 39) and on the
Policy Control screen in 3BM (Figure 40).
•
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.
•
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 broken into 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 the size for
dividing up units into volumes when Auto-Carving is enabled. This
setting can be between 1024 GB 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
Note: If you accidentally bypass display of the controller you want to
work with, press
Ctrl-Alt-Del to restart your computer and try again