HP MSA1000 With Fiber Connection

[Geoff Hughes]

I have an MSA 1000 with the A Channel filled with 300GB Drives. The B Channel is empty and available, but has the Fiber Connection above it, that controls the A Channel drives.

The question is, can I connect a SCSI cable to the SCSI B Connector in the rear, and load drives into the empty B Channel and put them to use on a different machine than is in use with the Fiber connection? The A Light is on the SCSI connector, but not the B, which suggests that I might be able to use Fiber for A and SCSI for B, but we have a lot of data on A...

TIA

[Uwe Zessin]

The MSA1000 controller module (labeled "Modular Smart Array 1000" in your picture) has 4 SCSI busses. The first bus connects to bays 1..7 of the MSA1000 frame. You have already populated these with disk drives.
The second bus connects to bays 8..14 in the MSA1000 frame. Those are currently empty, but you can plug in disk drives and access them from the current controller - you do not need to buy second controller module.

The remaining two busses go to the I/O module on the rear of the MSA1000 frame. They are used to connect additional disk drive enclosures - you CANNOT connect an external server to these connectors!

You can add a second controller module (there is more involved...), but this is for redundancy and it will share the 4 SCSI busses with the first controller module.

[Geoff Hughes]

Great, that sounds right to me too. When I drop the additional drives into bays 8-14, will it disrupt the array on 1-7? I have a ton of data there that would be rough to lose...

Thanks again

[Uwe Zessin]

There should not be a disruption (except for a minor settlement), even when you add disk drives to a partially populated bus. Best practices, however, suggest to always make a good backup before anything is changed on a system.