Quantity and type of drives in an HP 60 MSA

[dcason]

Hi,

I have an MSA 60 that's usually plugged in to my P800 controller on my DL360.

I was full with twelve of the HP 432146-001 drives in it at one point, so I had 3.6 TB in it and they were the 300 GB SAS 15K Seagate ST3300655SS hard drives. 

The drives were pulled and I want to replace them with something .... Either the same number of 300 GB hard drives or bigger drives and less of them, can I do that?  

What other hard drives besides the twelve 300 GB drives can I put in it now and get more capacity? 

Also again, do you have to have all twelve in there or can I get, for example five 1TB drives in there?

I don't want to swap out or change the controllor.

Cheers'
Dave

P.S. This thread has been moevd from ProLiant Storage Systems to Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Small and Medium Business). - Hp Forum moderator

[David_Schwartzs]

Step 4 of Configuration Information section of the quick specs shows the hard drives compatible with the MSA 60:
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12627_na/12627_na.HTML#Configuration%20Information

You don't have to fully populate the MSA 60, but in general your performance goes up the more drives you have populated, as you get higher aggregate read/write speeds and IOPS performance with a larger number of spindles.

There's certainly no need to replace your controller, but you will need to rebuild the RAID sets with new drives using the Array Configuration Utility.

Hope this helps!

[dcason]

Hi Dave !

Thanks, yep it'd have to be a new install and config in the array set but I just don't know much about the drive choices or what I should use.  This was a backup server originally with the DL360 but now I'm stuck with having to use it as a new Exchange Server box and a Backup Server because my existing one is failing.

With the original twelve 300 GB I had in there I had 3.6 GB - so keeping the same hardware, can I toss in five of those MDL type one TB drives for 5 TB in total or 6 drives or 7?   Do I need 5 for the RAID or 3 drives or all 12 drives, I have no idea .... 

It also says I have to have duel port drives - were the original ST3300655SS drives in there duel port?  So does that mean that the SATA's are out and I also see that those midline drives are only 7.2K drives so would that be noticeably slower?

As I said I have no idea about these drives so I'm open to suggestions!  (grin)  Also I have to try to keep it around $500-$750 to get this array alive if I can ...... 

Cheers'

Dave

[David_Schwartzs]

Minimum number of drives depends on RAID level you're using. RAID 5 requires 3 drives minimum, and no matter how many drives you're using, you lose 1 full drive to parity for data protection (so 5x1TB is actually 4TB in RAID5).

Dual port isn't a requirement with the MSA60 unless you're using dual domain. For connecting to a single server single controller it's not usually an issue. The original drives you had, in fact, were single port. (When dual port drives came out, HP gradually phased out single port drives, because dual port drives operate as single port drives in configurations that don't use the dual port anyway, so HP could reduce number of part numbers in the channel. So even systems that have dual port drives may be getting absolutely no advantage from the dual port)

The answer to speed from the 7.2K vs. 15K drives is... it depends. For long sequential reads and writes, you won't notice much of a speed difference. For random reads and writes, you'll definitely notice a difference. Considering that Exchange is typically more of a transactional "random" usage, you'd definitely see higher performance from the 15K drives, but the question becomes whether you need it.

Factors such as how many users/mailboxes you have, your volume of incoming and outgoing messages, overall mailbox sizes, version of Microsoft Exchange being run and the average size of individual messages and attachments all would determine the amount of space and performance (spindle count and RPM speed) you need.

[dcason]

Hi Dave,

OK, I didn't know what they were ....  so I can go with .... I dunno let's say 5 of those Midline drives for 5 TB so if that's the case - would it be better to use the 1TB 6 GB SAS drives or the TB 3G SATA MDL's ?

I'll have to see which is cheaper, also do you think the firmwear on the drives is an issue?  Are the drives from HP like their spare number 432146-001 any different than the generic Seagate ST3300655SS that was in there to begin with?

Cheers'
Dave

[David_Schwartzs]

I always recommend using HP branded drives. Whether there will or won't be issues is unforeseeable when using non-HP drives.

SAS drives typically are higher reliability and designed with Enterprise uses in mind, so I'll always recommend SAS over SATA for systems designed to run 24/7.

[dcason]

Thanks Dave !!

I'll continue to do some digging!

Cheers'
Dave