MSA 2040 reassign hot spare to different pool

[7684010035]

Hi, all. Working with an HP MSA 2040. One of the disks recently failed so the existing hot spare did it's job and became part of the pool. When we swapped out the bad drive for a new one that then became the hot spare, but we'd like that slot to go back to being part of the pool since the head is 12Gbps compared to the 6Gbps of the trays. Is there any way within the GUI or CLI to reassign the disk to go back to being part of the pool? The GUI is severely lacking and I have literally checked every page of the CLI Reference Guide to no avail. Powering-off the MSA and just moving the drives around is not an option.

Thanks in advance for your time!

[Cali]

This is done to avoid a double rebuild.

In fact, this results in wandering hot spare disks.

Now, the only Way is to remove the Old Hot Spare Disk, wait again for rebuild and put it back.

Than define again as Hot Spare.

You don't need to Shutdown, but it is a bit risky, as every rebuild is.

I prefer to choose Raid 6 and no HotSpare.

[HPSDMike]

Agreed with Cali, there is no way to accomplish what you are trying to do via any menu or CLI commands. The system is working as it is designed. You'd need to mark your new drive as a spare, pull the drive you don't want in the group, and let it rebuild on the spare. When complete, insert the old drive and mark it as a spare.

I wouldn't suggest going without a spare though. I suppose, if you really want to work around the way the MSA does hot sparing then you could just keep your spare drive sitting on a shelf and swap it in at a moment's notice. In that case, make sure you have alerting turned on and RAID 6.

[Benjamin_Smith]

Hi,

No, it is not possible to assign drives as a spare to a specific Pool,  The only safe and supported way to have a drive physically located elsewhere to where it is now, would be to power off the array and move it.  Once powered back on the meta-data will be read and things will carry on as normal.  Any other system to acheive this outcome will put data integrity and availability at risk.

However, be aware that only the SAS host ports are 12Gb/s, internally the MSA operates at 6Gb/s.  We do recommend that SSDs be installed in the array head due to a greater number of SAS lanes however..

[Edit: Typo and badly formatted signature!]