topic Upgrading existing drives by hot swapping in ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL)

Upgrading existing drives by hot swapping

sam02 — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 16:12:14 GMT

Hi everyone,

say I have a RAID array made up entirely of identical 2TB drives and I want to upgrade these drives to 3TB ones. Can I simply remove 1 drive, wait 1 minute and slide in a new 3TB drive, wait for the rebuild, and do the same procedure 1 drive at a time until they are all replaced?

My concern is that I would not be replacing the hard drive with an identical part number....

Thanks for the info.

Re: Upgrading existing drives by hot swapping

Gadsby — Fri, 17 Mar 2017 14:58:34 GMT

Hi,

What type of Raid we talking, does your device support Hot plug? Are those new drives is HPE? You can try and find out but be sure to do backup.

Great weekend.

Re: Upgrading existing drives by hot swapping

Jimmy Vance — Fri, 17 Mar 2017 15:12:20 GMT

I know this procedure is documented, but I can't seem to find it with a quikc search.

first things first BACKUP YOUR EXISTING DATA before you do anything.

To answer the question, yes you can pull and replace each drive with a larger one allowing for the rebuild process to complete after each drive swap. Once all the drives have been swapped use HPSSA to expand the array to claim the addition space. Once this is complete you will then need to use the tools within the OS to expand a partition, or create a new partition with the new space.

The question you need to answer is, which will be quicker:

1) Do as outlined above

2) Pull the current drives, create new array with new drives, install base OS and then restore data from backup

Scenario 1 can take a long time if the system is still in use during the rebuild process.

Re: Upgrading existing drives by hot swapping

sam02 — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 15:12:16 GMT

You make a valid point about the time required for 4x full drive rebuilds.

Considering these are data only drives (ie. OS is another seperates drives that will remain untouched), I think I will go ahead and simply install new ones, create array and restore data.

Thanks.