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Cheetah 15K.7 SAS Product Manual, Rev. A
5.2.4
S.M.A.R.T.
S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology. This technology is intended
to recognize conditions that indicate imminent drive failure and is designed to provide sufficient warning of a
failure to allow you to back up the data before an actual failure occurs.
Note.
The drive’s firmware monitors specific attributes for degradation over time but can’t predict instanta-
neous drive failures.
Each monitored attribute has been selected to monitor a specific set of failure conditions in the operating per-
formance of the drive and the thresholds are optimized to minimize “false” and “failed” predictions.
Controlling S.M.A.R.T.
The operating mode of S.M.A.R.T. is controlled by the DEXCPT and PERF bits on the Informational Exceptions
Control mode page (1Ch). Use the DEXCPT bit to enable or disable the S.M.A.R.T. feature. Setting the DEX-
CPT bit disables all S.M.A.R.T. functions. When enabled, S.M.A.R.T. collects on-line data as the drive performs
normal read and write operations. When the PERF bit is set, the drive is considered to be in “On-line Mode
Only” and will not perform off-line functions.
You can measure off-line attributes and force the drive to save the data by using the Rezero Unit command.
Forcing S.M.A.R.T. resets the timer so that the next scheduled interrupt is in two hours.
You can interrogate the drive through the host to determine the time remaining before the next scheduled mea-
surement and data logging process occurs. To accomplish this, issue a Log Sense command to log page 0x3E.
This allows you to control when S.M.A.R.T. interruptions occur. Forcing S.M.A.R.T. with the RTZ command
resets the timer.
Performance impact
S.M.A.R.T. attribute data is saved to the disk so that the events that caused a predictive failure can be recre-
ated. The drive measures and saves parameters once every two hours subject to an idle period on the drive
interfaces. The process of measuring off-line attribute data and saving data to the disk is uninterruptable. The
maximum on-line only processing delay is summarized below:
Maximum processing delay
On-line only delay
DEXCPT = 0, PERF = 1
Fully-enabled delay
DEXCPT = 0, PERF = 0
S.M.A.R.T. delay times
42 milliseconds
163 milliseconds
