Adding disks to an AutoRaid

[Rui Vilao]

Greetings,

Hi we are planing to add storage to one of our 12H.
Is there any inconvenient in adding 18Gb disks to a disk array containing 6x9Gb?

Thanks in advance,

Kind Regards,

Rui.

[FINN LETH_1 · Accepted solution]

Hi

We have autoraid in our company both the 12H in several years and now some new virtual arrays with autoraid.

The discs can be mixed and the only issue is the performance issue.

The higher disc capacity the lower are the performance reletively speaking.

Hope you can use this information

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi,

You can mix and match drives but to get any real benefits, you need to add at least two drives and four would be much better. I would look very hard at adding 4 36GB drives and leaving as much space as possible unconfigured to maximize RAID 1/0 space. Assuming auto-include is enabled, all you have to do is plug one drive in at a time; watch the lights blink; and add the next drive.

One other thing to consider is to purchase another 12H on the used market. I recently had a vendor beg me to purchase a 12H with 2 controllers and 3 power supplies (no drives) for well under $3K.

[Insu Kim]

In the manual,
Disks of different capacities can be installed in the same array, providing maximum flexibility and expandability for your disk array. This makes it easy to increase your array's data capacity as new, higher capacity disks become available.

There is an important point to remember when using disks of different capacities in the same array.
You should add at least two high capacity disks to the array to use its full capacity.
If you add a single high capacity disk, the array will now be able to use its full capacity.
In this situation, the array can only use capacity equal to that of the largest disk already installed in the array.
Therefore, It should be no problem for you to add 2 more 18 GB disks to the array.

Hope this helps,