MSA1500 disk move

[Benjamin Wold]

I just added a new MSA30 shelf to my MSA1500. Can I safely move some drives to the new shelf in order to spread my existing arrays over the 2 shelves? Thanks in advance.
BTW: Just updated firmware on the MSA to 7.00. All HBAs FW/BIOS/Drivers are up to date. Using MPIO for MSA on Windows.

[Uwe Zessin · Accepted solution]

I one did in on an MSA1000 and it worked except for one disk drive that had a connection problem to the backplane. So I moved the disk drive back to the old address which was unoccupied, waited for the RAID rebuild.
Then I powered off the box again, move the disk to its new position, powered up and this time everything worked.

It is important that the disks be moved while the power is off, else the controller will assume a disk failure.

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hello Benjamin,

I did this a few times with MSA1000 and MSA1500cs systems. No problems till today. :) It's important, as Uwe already said, that the systems is powered off. The meta data on the disks is read on startup. If you pull a disk out of a running system, the MSA will detect a disk failure. One of my customers did this one time - the first disk was not the problem, but he pulled a second disk... Fortunately he had a well working backup. :)

Shutdown the system, rearrange the disks and poweron the system. The MSA should detect the new disk disk layout and everything is going to be alright. :) But you should have a tested backup before you do this!

Best regards,
Patrick

[Benjamin Wold]

Good info. That's what I was looking for. Thanks