MSA 1000 with 300GB Drives

[Wayne Bonett]

Wanting to know are 300GB drives Supported on MSA1000. Have had two 300GB drives break in the last week since putting them in. Also finding that when one drive goes in MSA that hosts Pool/ Volume gets deactivated even when not in the specific Array. Re-start host and all is well again. Any assistance greatly appreciated.
Cheers
Wayne

[sgunelius]

Wayne,

According to the QuickSpecs guide the 300 GB Pluggable Ultra320 Universal Hard Drive, 10,000 rpm (1"), Part# 350964-B22 is supported on your MSA1000.

I can't think of a reason why it would flake out on you like that. Are you running the latest version of firmware (4.48) for the MSA1000? Have you upgraded the firmware on the drives themselves?

Scott

[Wayne Bonett]

Hi Scott

Yeah its strange to me to. Am on 4.48 Firmware. Noticed the last drive to go seemed to have a red light indicating H/W problem, it also could not be seen in ACU. I removed from enclosure and re-added, now it seems ok. At the time this drive appeared to fail a host lun was deactivated. Restarted host and now all appears ok. I just need to know whats causing this as cant afford the downtime. Only got one host on MSA at the moment. Am thinking that lun deactivation could be related to Secure Path on host but can't be sure with the failing drive situation on MSA. Any thouhgts

[Wayne Bonett]

Forgot to mention Firmware on the drives is HPB1. Is there a later version available ?
Also noticed transfer speed for drives listed as Ultra3 SCSI and drives are in fact 320SCSI. Maybe where on the right track?

[Uwe Zessin]

> Maybe where on the right track?

No, the MSA1000 controller module can't do U320, so the disk drives negotiate down to U160.

[Wayne Bonett]

So your saying controller is not compatible with U320, when scott above has said that 300GB model disk is supported config.

Do you think this could be causing disks to go offline.?
Should I bother trying to upgrade disk firmware, if so how is it done as have tried a number of methods eg. PSP751, firmware update 7.50 and MSA Firmware update. With no luck.
Thanks for info is much appreciated. I just want to get this thing stable.
Cheers
Wayne

[Uwe Zessin]

> So your saying controller is not compatible with U320

No, that is NOT what I have said and I have not made a statement about 300GB disk drives!


Again: the controller can only do _up_ to U160.

In that case, the controller and an U320 disk drive will agree to transfer data with U160 speed.

If you put an Ultra-2 disk (80 MByte/sec) into the box, the controller and _this_ disk drive will agree to transfer data with Ultra-2 speed, but the data transfer speed between the controller and an Ultra-3 or U320 disk drive will be 160 MBytes/sec.