megacli / mfi driver powersave mode

[Mike Tancsa]

More a "for the archives post" as it took me a while to find this, but 
if you are using an mfi based controller and using the disks as 
unconfigured jbod, the mfi controller might by default spindown inactive 
drives.  If you have a somewhat busy server, this is not an issue.

The drive will spin down with a message to the console something like

Power state change on PD 1d(e0xf5/s0) from ON(0) to POWERSAVE(1)

Writing to the disk will spin it up, but this can take a bit of time and 
can cause an OS error.  To disable this behavior, the MegaCli tool from 
the ports seems to be able to adjust this setting.  ( I tried from the 
BIOS, and its not there)


# MegaCli -AdpSetProp -EnblSpinDownUnConfigDrvs 0 -aAll

Adapter 0: Set Disable Spin Down of Unconfigured Drives :  success.

Exit Code: 0x00


My card is a 9240-8i
# mfiutil show firmware
mfi0 Firmware Package Version: 20.13.1-0208
mfi0 Firmware Images:
Name  Version                          Date         Time         Status
BIOS  4.38.02.2_4.16.08.00_0x06060A05  07/23/2014
   07/23/2014
   active
PCLI  03.02-020:#%00009                May 07 2012  13:21:53     active
BCON  4.0-61-e_50-Rel                  Sep 09 2014  11:45:57     active
NVDT  3.09.03-0064                     Oct 06 2014  12:00:15     active
APP   2.130.404-3836                   Oct 16 2014  06:50:12     active
BTBL  2.02.00.00-0001                  Aug 18 2010  11:44:44     active
  # mfiutil show adapter
mfi0 Adapter:
     Product Name: LSI MegaRAID SAS 9240-8i
    Serial Number: SP12147654
         Firmware: 20.13.1-0208
      RAID Levels: JBOD, RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID10, RAID50
   Battery Backup: not present
            NVRAM: 32K
   Onboard Memory: 0M
   Minimum Stripe: 8K
   Maximum Stripe: 64K

A small caveat, the tool also lets you control the same behavior for hot 
spares. However, the perspective is opposite.

# MegaCli -AdpSetProp -DsblSpinDownHSP 1 -aAll

Adapter 0: Set Disable spin Down of Hot Spares :  success.

Exit Code: 0x00

vs

# MegaCli -AdpSetProp -EnblSpinDownUnConfigDrvs 0 -aAll

Adapter 0: Set Disable Spin Down of Unconfigured Drives :  success.

Exit Code: 0x00

  10.1-STABLE FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE #14 r275472: Wed Dec  3 22:46:51 EST 
2014

	---Mike


-- 
-------------------
Mike Tancsa, tel +1 519 651 3400
Sentex Communications, mike at sentex.net
Providing Internet services since 1994 www.sentex.net
Cambridge, Ontario Canada   http://www.tancsa.com/