Areca ARC-5030 Series, User Manual

Page: 81 / 187

LCD CONFIGURATION MENU
81
the drives to come ready at the optimum time without straining
the system power supply. Staggering drive spin-up in a multiple
drive environment also avoids the extra cost of a power supply
designed to meet short-term startup power demand as well as
steady state conditions.
Areca has supported the fixed value staggered power up function
in its previous version firmware. But from firmware version
1.39, Areca RAID controller has included the option for customer
to select the disk drives sequentially stagger power up value.
The values can be selected from 0.4ms to 6ms per step which
powers up one drive.
4.8.5.9 HDD SMART Status Polling
An external RAID enclosure has the hardware monitor in the
dedicated backplane that can report HDD temperature status
to the controller. However, PCI cards do not use backplanes if
the drives are internal to the main server chassis. The type of
enclosure cannot report the HDD temperature to the controller.
For this reason, HDD SMART Status Polling was added to enable
scanning of the HDD temperature function in the version 1.36
date: 2005-05-19 (and later). It is necessary to enable “HDD
SMART Status Polling” function before SMART information is
accessible. This function is disabled by default.
The following screen shot shows how to change the BIOS setting
to enable the Polling function.
4.8.5.10 Disk Capacity Truncation Mode
ARECA RAID controllers use drive truncation so that drives from
differing vendors are more likely to be able to be used as spares
for each other. Drive truncation slightly decreases the usable
capacity of a drive that is used in redundant units.
The controller provides three truncation modes in the system
configuration: Multiples Of 10G , Multiples Of 1G , and No
Truncation .
Multiples Of 10G: If you have 120 GB drives from differ-
ent vendors; chances are that the capacity varies slightly. For
example, one drive might be 123.5 GB, and the other 120 GB.