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 3DM2.

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 automatically attempt to rebuild a degraded unit if there is no spare, using either an available drive or a failed drive. (See Setting the Auto-Rebuild Policy.)

Auto-Carving. Determines whether the auto-carving policy is enabled or disabled. When it is enabled, when a new unit is created, 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. (See Using Auto-Carving for Multi LUN Support.)

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. Sets the size for dividing up units into volumes when Auto-Carving is enabled and a unit is created. This setting can be between 1024 GB and 32768 GB. (See Setting the Size of Volumes Created with Auto-Carving.) Changing this setting has no effect on existing units.

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 based on the settings specified with the policies Number of drives per spin-up and Delay between spin-up settings. These policies can only be set using 3BM or the CLI.

Note: This policy does not apply to drives attached to an expander.

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.

Delay before spin-up. (3BM only) The delay time (in seconds) before the first set of drives on this particular controller will start to spin-up.


	It is possible to enable or disable automatic detection of drives on the controller’s ports for staggered spinup during hot swapping of drives. This feature is only available in the CLI using the autodetect=on\|off command. For more information, refer to /cx set autodetect=on\|off disk=<p:-p>\|all in the3ware SATA+SAS RAID Controller Card CLI Guide, Version 10.2.

Export unconfigured disks (JBOD). This setting is not applicable for 9750 controllers.

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 OOB scheme is used. If your drives support the SATA ATA-6 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 does not apply to drives that are attached to an expander. This policy can only be set and only shows in 3BM.

Auto-Verify Preferred Date and Time. Sets the default date and time for auto-verify to run, when the Verify Schedule follows the weekly "Basic" schedule and Auto-Verify is enabled for specific units. Note that in 3DM2, the Basic and Advanced Auto-Verify schedule is set on the Schedule page. Enabling or Disabling Auto-Verify is a Unit Policy and is set on the Create Disk Array screen in 3BM and the Controller Settings page in 3DM2.

Some additional policies can be set at the unit level. For more information, see Setting Unit Policies.