Patent ID: 7661002

Claim:
A method for increasing the likelihood of providing a warranted lifetime of a capacitor pack in a storage controller, the method comprising: detecting that a temperature of the capacitor pack has risen above a predetermined threshold while an operating voltage of the capacitor pack is at a first voltage value; determining whether a projected lifetime of the capacitor pack is less than the warranted lifetime; reducing said operating voltage of the capacitor pack to a second value, if said projected lifetime of the capacitor pack is less than the warranted lifetime, in order to increase the projected lifetime of the capacitor pack; determining whether said reducing said operating voltage of the capacitor pack to said second value would cause the capacitor pack to be storing less energy than required for backing up a volatile write cache of the storage controller to a non-volatile memory of the storage controller; and reducing a size of said volatile write cache, prior to said reducing said operating voltage, if said reducing said operating voltage of the capacitor pack to said second value would cause the capacitor pack to be storing less energy than required for backing up said volatile write cache to said non-volatile memory.