Manually enable CCTL / TLER for drives in HW RAID?

[Stereodude]

Do true hardware RAID cards, specifically the various LSI based cards, automatically enable CCTL / TLER and set the appropriate timeout delay on drives plugged into them, or is that something that should be done manually before putting the drives on the controller?

IE: I buy a stack of enterprise based drives for HW based RAID. Do I need to configure each drive one at a time while on a HBA with a program like smartctl to enable CCTL / TLER and set a appropriate timeout delay prior to connecting the drives to the LSI HW based RAID card?

 

[Stereodude]

Hmm... No replies.

I guess I will attempt to test this. My thought is to pull a drive from an array and see if CCTL / TLER is set. Of course that doesn't rule out the possibility that the controller clears the setting during shut down. A slightly more comprehensive tests will be necessary.

My thought is to take 2 drives, enable CCTL / TLER on one, not on the other. Put on the HW RAID card, make an array with them, use them a bit, shut down and pull the drives and see if none, one, or both have CCTL / TLER enabled.

 

[aj84]

Some time ago I experimented with CCTL / TLER and changing the drive-settings with smartctl: all drives I tested lost the custom setting after a power cycle (sometimes it even doesn't survive a reboot) - they simply returned to their factory defaults (in my tests: SCT Error Recovery Control Read/Write = disabled). All of my tests were done with SATA drives - perhaps SAS disks behave different?

I guess: To determine if a hardware controller actually changes the CCTL / TLER setting you need to query the current setting from the drives while they are running in a hardware raid array and compare the results to the factory default settings of these drives. But: Do these hardware controlle pass these smartctl commands to the disks?

 

[Stereodude]

I guess: To determine if a hardware controller actually changes the CCTL / TLER setting you need to query the current setting from the drives while they are running in a hardware raid array and compare the results to the factory default settings of these drives. But: Do these hardware controllers pass these smartctl commands to the disks?

I don't think they will pass the commands.

Supposedly drives that have proper CCTL/TLER support will keep the setting through a power cycle. I guess I will have to experiment with some of the drives I have. I have a number of enterprise SATA drives that I'm putting into my new server (hence the thread topic since I'm not sure if I need to enable CCTL/TLER for them or not). I would expect them to keep the setting.

 

[aj84]

I would expect them to keep the setting.

Exptected that, too...but my ones didn't:
HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 512n (HUS724030ALA640/0F14689)
WD RE4 WD2000FYYZ
WD RE4 WD2003FYYS
Toshiba DT01ACA300 (Consumer grade)
Toshiba MD04ACA400 (Consumer grade)

Pleas post your findings!

 

[Stereodude]

Please post your findings!

Will do.

 

[Stereodude]

Tried two 4TB drives today hanging off an Intel controller...

Toshiba MG04ACA400E (Enterprise)
Toshiba MD04ACA400 (Consumer)

Both held the setting through reset, but not through a power cycle.

Maybe HW RAID controllers automatically attempt to change the setting on all the connected drives at startup.