MSA1500 Drive "Hot Swaps"

[A. Shane Graham]

I am currently in the process of doing a replacement of ALL of my drives in my MSA1500. We currently have a total of 4 shelves, most of which are 250GB SATA drives split into 2 logical arrays and 3-4 logical drives within each. The individual drives themselves are being replaced with 1TB SATAs.

The issue is, when I hot swap a drive, ALL of the logical drives of that array must rebuild themselves onto that new drive. (Which takes almost all day for ONE drive) This poses a problem because at this rate it will take me close to a month to successfully upgrade all of my shelves. My question is - is it possible to hot swap more than one drive at a time in an array to have more than one rebuilding at a time?
Once ALL of the drives for that given array have been replaced, then I can work on utilizing that new space.

[Martin Smoral]

you could swap out 1 drive from each array at the same time as long as there is NO Raid0 Logical drives. If all the logicals are R5 and you swap 2 drives at once on each array then all the R5 logicals will go down.

[kris rombauts]

Hi Graham,

the smartarray based controllers (like the msa1500) can only rebuild one logical drive/array at a time. If you have i.e. two logical drives in an array and replace a disk, it will rebuild the array in two times (one logical drive at a time so to speak).

So if you have more then one raid array, the same applies. The first one that gets his new disk will start the rebuild and when finised , the next one will be rebuild.

So even if you pulled out more then one, it would make no difference other then you can leave it working/rebuilding during night/weekend. Rebuilds are done in sequence.


backup/restore might be faster but means data unavailable during that time...

HTH

Kris

[Trygve Henriksen]

I would have backed up all the data on the first array, scrapped it and pulled all the HDDs and replaced them at one time, then built a new ARRAY on them.
And of course done a restore...

Then, then next weekend, I'd have done the other one...

That will also give you much grater freedom as to the layout of the new ARRAYS, logical disks, spares, and everything.
And you get access to the new space immediately.

The only 'problem' is that it needs to be done during a weekend, and that users won't have access to their data during the operation.
(I don't have a social life, so the first is no problem for me, and I'm not paid well enough to feel sorry for the users)
As only the physical HDD-swap has to be done on site, it can be helpful to have remote access in to the servers.
(No need to rush onsite saturday morning if the backup failed. And it's nice to be able to check the restore progress from time to time)
In other words, I've done jobs like these before...