Changing 3ware Storsave Profile Without Rebooting

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If you have ever had 3ware cards underperforming before you have probably found out about the storsave profile and how it can effect performance of your RAID array.

Changing your storsave profile can easily be done on the fly without rebooting your server by using the tw_cli utility.

tw_cli /c0/u0 set storsave=balance

Where c0 is the RAID card, and u0 is the array you wish to change the profile for. There are 3 profiles, protect which is the slowest and most secure. Balanced which you should be using if you have a BBU on the RAID card, and then finally performance which doesn’t even use the BBU even if you have one! We set our arrays to balanced when we use a BBU


 

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  • Ricardo

    Hello aaron!

    I’m owner of one 3ware 9690SA-8I with BBU and you post is very helpfull because I was confused what storsave profile should be use with BBU. Now, the balanced is the right to use. I made the same question to support of LSI and they told me wich should be use the performance profile with BBU…well I thought, something is not right, because performance profile doesn’t use write journaling = disable BBU.
    I’m using windows 7 and have one question:
    With raid controller + BBU should I check the turn off windows flush cache (under device management task), or uncheck it?
    Regards and thanks for everything.

  • Hi Ricardo,

    Good to hear you got the first part resolved, I’m surprised LSI is suggesting the performance profile as that would be quite risky!

    In regards to the windows flush cache, I believe you should keep this on due to running a BBU on the RAID card. However, I’m not 100% on this one!

    Regards,
    Aaron

  • Ricardo

    Thanks for the answer aaron. So, if I check the additional box, didn’t I disable the write journaling of BBU?
    I make this question because since I have done experiments with this setting, seems that this box checked does nothing on controller info and alarms ,like a “cache flush device” doesn’t appear…But may be I’m wrong…

    Thanks for everything

  • Ricardo

    Forgot to tell other thing I’m sorry:
    I noticed wich write back cache option on software management is interconnected with write back cache under device management tag on windows and vice-versa. However, by default, the second option (turn off windows write cache) is disabled /unchecked.
    My question is: Should I enable this option since I have a BBU and seems that this option could make sense just with BBU attached?
    There are some relationship between this option and BBU since wich says “unless THIS DEVICE (supposedly raid controller) has a separate power supply”? Could this power supply means BBU?

    Now the question is more complete and understandable…
    Regards and thank you very much.

  • Hi Ricardo,

    Sorry, not sure on this one! Might be best to check with 3ware/LSI to see if they can shed some light on this. I don’t have much experience with 3Ware on Windows servers, we run a lot more Linux than Windows servers.

    Let me know if you find out any info, would be interested to know!

    Regards,
    Aaron

  • Ricardo

    Hi Aaron,
    Yes I will let you konw about this:) Stay tune. I think this box has something relationship about write journaling.

    Regards friend