EVA5000 with 1TB FATA drives

[JohnNordien]

Hello,

We have an EVA5000 2C8D, VCS 3110, 2 disk groups (FC & FATA). Last July 2008 we wanted to add storage to our FATA disk group and went to purchase more 500GB FATA. We were told that 500GB FATA were not available and we had to purchase 1TB drives. So we purchased them but only recently installed them. The characteristics of the 1TB drives are as follows:

Type: Fibre Channel Disk
Manufacturer: HPQ
Model number: NB1000D4450
Firmware version: HP04
Formatted capacity: 931.32 GB
Drive Type: Near-Online

The disks added in they and grouped normally. Four days ago the FATA disk group initiated a leveling operation. It is still pending. The LUNs within the disk group are all in working order. We openned a case with HP and were told that the 1TB disks are incompatible with EVA5000 with any VCS and need to be removed. We were informed that the entire disk group may need to be destroyed and rebuilt.

Yesterday we tried to create a LUN on the FATA disk group and it has not completed, so it cannot be deleted. The FC disk group seems to be working normally.

Has anyone else fallen into this situation?
How did you resolve it?

Thanks in advance,

John Nordien

[Víctor Cespón]

Ungroup, remove those disks inmediatly and talk to the reseller. 1 TB FATA disks are NOT supported on EVA3000 and 5000:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c01519690

The leveling is not what you should be worried about, leveling only moves data from one disks to others. Metadada corruption is much more worrying.

[JohnNordien]

Further update on this.
Working with our HP case tech support engineer we performed a Controller Resync operation (basically a warm reboot). and this resulted in the array completing leveling on all disk groups. We are now ungrouping the 1TB FATA disks, waiting for leveling to occur after each ungroup. Leveling is taking about 18 hours.
Is it safe to ungroup disks one after another in quick succession? There is nothing in the documentation we have that says we must wait for leveling to complete before ungrouping the next disk. My thoughts are that if you wait for the array to acknowledge the ungroup (ie data is moved off before leveling occurs) and then ungroup the next disk and so on, that leveling is interrupted and restarts after each ungroup operation. So, is it safe to ungroup disks one after another in quick succession?

Thanks is advance!

John Nordien

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

> So, is it safe to ungroup disks one after
> another in quick succession?

I believe so yes.

Cheers,

Rob

[KathyL1]

Hi John,

According to HP the use of 1Tb FATA drives (or 450Gb 15K drives) in an EVA 3000/5000 is NOT qualified or supported with any version of VCS firmware and there are no plans to change this in a future release.

See http://www13.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en&docId=emr_na-c01519690-1

Kathy