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Pegasus2 How do I turn off all hard disk drive power management features of Pegasus2?
Ken Chou posted this 22 January 2014

  1. Open Terminal, located in the Utilities folder (choose Go > Utilities in the Finder).
  2. In the Terminal window, type promiseutil. This will open a cliib> prompt.
  3. At the cliib> prompt, type ctrl -a mod -s "powersavinglevel=0"
  4. To verify the change, at the cliib> prompt type ctrl -v. You should see PowerSavingLevel: 0
To prevent the Mac from putting the Pegasus2 to sleep:
  1. Open System Preferences -> Energy Saver
  2. Uncheck the box beside "Put hard disks to sleep when possible"
NOTE If the above option is enabled, the hard drives in the Pegasus2 will spin down even if the PowerSavingLevel=0.  The Mac will control all disk spin down.

Pegasus2 Firmware v5.04.0000.17 and above offers the following default hard disk drive power management settings:
  • IdleTimeToParkHead:  1 minute.
  • IdleTimeToLowRotation:  5 minutes.
  • IdelTimeToSpinDown:  30 minutes,
  • PowerSavingLevel:  3.

PowerSavingLevel Options:
  • Level 0   Disabled.
  • Level 1   Park R/W heads.
  • Level 2   Park R/W heads. Lower rotation speed
  • Level 3   Park R/W heads. Lower rotation Speed. Spin-down HDD.

As highlighted above there are three levels of power management offered by Pegasus2.
Note: 0 simply disables all.

Lets say the user unchecks "Enable Idle HDD Spin Down" from the GUI, only the spin-down function will be disabled (level 3)


Other HDD power management features are still enabled.

To disable all HDD power management features, please follow the steps shown above. Once you invoke via Promise CLI the command "ctrl -a mod -s "powersavinglevel=0" this will disable all power management of the hard disk drives in Pegasus2. 

For the next service release we plan to disable level 1 and level 2 by default. This way the user only needs to change the setting via the Promise Utility GUI and simply uncheck "Enable Idle HDD Spin Down"

Important Information!

Please do not confuse "Power Saving Level" and "Power Management" features in Pegasus2

"Power Saving Level" (default is 3) is to control the hard disk drive rotation speed, spin down and head park.

"Power Management" (default is enable) is for Pegasus2 to support ACPI detection, wake-from-sleep and hot plugging of the Thunderbolt device.

Do not disable Power Management. Doing so will make the Pegasus2 hang when the Mac is in sleep or shut down and restarted and will require the Pegasus and the Mac to be power cycled to return to normal operation.

To view Pegasus2 Power Management state:
  • At the cliib> prompt, type: ctrl -v
  • You will see in the controller settings "PowerManagement: Enable"
  • If "PowerManagent: Disable", please follow the steps below to enable Power Management.
To enable Pegasus2 Power Management functions:
  • At the cliib> prompt, type: ctrl -a mod -s "powermanagement=enable"



Pegasus2 How to bench mark Pegasus2 R8
Ken Chou posted this 26 December 2013

There are several bench tools out there among them are Black Magic Disk Speed Test and AJA System Tests.


These tools are ok to gauge basic throughput.  Before you begin your benchmark testing we recommend to enable the aggressive pre-fetching AKA “controller forced read ahead” on your 
Pegasus2. 


Promise plans to enable controller forced read ahead by default in the upcoming service release.

NOTE: Controller forced read ahead is most beneficial if you are working with Audio and Video files where the IO access is large block sequential IO.
Small block random IO will not benefit from this setting.

How to enable controller forced read using Promise CLI:

1. Login using your Administrator and from a terminal in your Mac host type “promiseutil”

2. From our CLI type: ctrl -a mod -i 1 -s "forcedreadahead=enable"

3. Confirm the setting is now enabled issuing the following command: ctrl -v


CtrlId: 1
Alias:
OperationalStatus: OK                 PowerOnTime:2 hours 1 minute
LUNAffinity: N/A                      LunmappingMethod:WWN Based
CacheUsagePercentage: 35%             DirtyCachePercentage:34%

Vendor: PROMISE                       Model:Pegasus2 R8
PartNo: F29DS8722000000               SerialNo:M92H13A52100830
HWRev: B3                             WWN:2000-0001-5557-5d82
CmdProtocol: SCSI-3
MemType: DDR2 SDRAM                   MemSize:512MB
FlashType: Flash Memory               FlashSize:8MB
NVRAMType: FRAM                        NVRAMSize:128KB
BootLoaderVersion: 5.04.0000.17       BootLoaderBuildDate: Oct 25, 2013
FirmwareVersion: 5.04.0000.17         FirmwareBuildDate: Oct25, 2013
SoftwareVersion: 5.04.0000.17         SoftwareBuildDate: Oct25, 2013
BIOSVersion: 5.04.0000.17             BIOSBuildDate:Oct 25, 2013
SingleImageVersion: 5.04.0000.17      SingleImageBuildDate: Oct 25, 2013
CtrlCPLDVersion: 6.03

DiskArrayPresent: 1                   OverallRAIDStatus:OK
LogDrvPresent: 1                      LogDrvOnline:1
LogDrvOffline: 0                      LogDrvCritical:0
PhyDrvPresent: 8                      PhyDrvOnline:8
PhyDrvOffline: 0                      PhyDrvPFA:0
GlobalSparePresent: 0                 DedicatedSparePresent:0
RevertibleGlobalSparePresent: 0       RevertibleDedicatedSparePresent: 0
RevertibleGlobalSpareUsed: 0          RevertibleDedicatedSpareUsed:0

WriteThroughMode: No                  MaxSectorSize:4KB
PreferredCacheLineSize: 64 KB         CacheLineSize: 64 KB
Coercion: Enabled                     CoercionMethod:GBTruncate
SMART: Enabled                        SMARTPollingInterval:10 minutes
MigrationStorage: DDF                 CacheFlushInterval:3 second(s)
PollInterval: 15 second(s)            AdaptiveWBCache:Disabled
ForcedReadAhead: Enable

PowerSavingLevel: 3                   SpindownType:All drives
IdleTimeToParkRwHeads: 1 minute       IdleTimeToLowerRotationSpeed: 5minutes
IdleTimeToSpinDown: 30 minutes

SGPIOBackPlane: Default/Generic (0)   SASReadyLED: Off
SpinUpDelay: 0 millisecond            PowerManagement:Enable

SecurityAdminPassword: N/A

PciFuncAddr: N/A                      PciLinkSpeed:N/A
PciLinkWidth: N/A

After this you can run your typical benchmark tool such as Black Magic Disk Speed Test or AJA System Test.

Note: Although these tools are common and readily available to the public, Promise does not use these tools to gauge performance on Pegasus 2.
These bench tools do not exercise Pegasus 2 full performance bandwidth. Real-world video and audio applications set the “queue depth” to something more realistic like 7 or 8 thus why you don't see the “real” throughput of Pegasus2.

What is the real throughput of Pegasus2 R8?

Using Promise home grown bench test tools:

For RAID 0  ForcedReadAhead enabled:
-1340MB/s sequential writes
-1350MB/s sequential reads

For RAID 5  ForcedReadAhead enabled:
-1020MB/s sequential writes
-1030MB/s sequential reads

What parameters does Promise use in their testing to gauge the above performance?

100% sequential write, IO request size 1MB, Queue depth 8, file size 100GB
100% sequential read, IO request size 1MB, Queue depth 8, file size 100GB

Using Black Magic Disk Speed Test:

RAID 0 configuration using - ForcedReadAhead enabled:



Using RAID 5 out of the box configuration using - ForcedReadAhead enabled

NotePegasus2 ships from the factory pre-configured with one logical drive in a RAID 5 configuration.  Synchronization is not yet complete. The synchronization process is running in the background. Device performance will not be optimal until background synchronization is completed. The process will take several hours. The amount of time required depends on the total capacity.


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