Adding drives to ML350e Gen 8- what do i need ?

[mile140]

First off, i am not a server expert by any means.  Our server ML350e Gen 8, is almost out of disk space and has a failing drive in the RAID.  It is currently configured RAID 5 with 4 physical disks, equally split as a C volume and a D volume.  The C volume has a failing drive indicated and the D volume is nearly out of space. 

I have purchased 4 identical to the original drives and inserted them into the 4  remaining slots, but they do not light up and do not appear in the HP Array configuration utility.  The existing drives show up in the Dynamic Smart Array B120i RAID in Embedded Slot.  

What do i need to do or add to the server in order to use the additional drives to expand the D volume with 2 of the drives and have 1 of the drives replace the failing drive and have the 4th drive be a hot spare ?

Thank you for any assistance with this.  

Dynamic Smart Array B120i RAID in Embedded Slot

Dynamic Smart Array B120i RAID in Embedded Slot

[PDP-Fan]

This is a bit hard to understand... You say you have 4 disks in a RAID-5 configuration. So you only have one logigal drive, that is then split up into C and D drive on Windows.

How can drive C have failed disks?

First look into Smart Array Manager... do you see failed drives too? Then, first replace the failed drives until your existing configuration is OK again. Changing configuration on a system that has failed drives can be fatal to your data.

Then look into your server. Are the other 4 disk slots connected to the B120i? There are versions of this controller that have only one internal SAS/SATA connector, allowing you to use only 4 drives.
If that is the case, you need a different controller with two internal connectors.
Or if you like the adventure, you could use a cable from the external connector, through an empty PCI panel, into the server and connecting the other 4 slots.... but that looks ugly

[mile140]

Thank you for the reply.  As i mentioned, i am not an expert, so my terminology and understanding of server technology may not be the best.  The drive that was failing has failed overnight- i hot swapped it and it is currently rebuilding the Raid (Raid 5).  There are 2 volumes in the raid configuration, one volume for C drive, one volume for D drive.  Both are Raid 5, so 4 drives total.  

The configuration has 8 drives (only 4 are recognized and light up)  one of the Mini SAS cables from the backplane goes to the motherboard, which i assume is an onboard B120i controller.  The other mini SAS cable is connected to the backplane but not attached on the other end.  

So as you said, i need a controller with 2  connectors- what model number would that be ? would both SAS cables plug into it or would i leave 1 connected to the motherboard ?

[PDP-Fan]

Your information is still confusing... You say you have two RAID-5 volumes but only 4 disks. One RAID-5 needs a minimum of 3 disk drives. So you would need 6. The only possibility to make two volumes from four drives is 2x RAID-1 (mirrored) or RAID-0 (no redundancy)

Except you made one RAID-5 volume (physical) and split that up into two equal sized parts. This can be done in the Smart Array setup or in the operating system. But I don't recommend to split a RAID drive in this way. It is confusing for other people that must manage the system and it's an additional source for failure. And if there is a problem with the RAID, you may loose both C and D drive at once...

Common practise is to have a RAID-1 (two drives mirrored) for the op. system and RAID-5 (min. 3 disks) for data. This way, in each RAID, one disk can fail without losing data.

The cable that is not attached is the reason why you see only the first 4 disks.
I only know the ML350p (performance) Gen8 and that board is equipped two SAS/SATA connectors.
According to "ML350e Gen8 quickspecs" (Google) the Smart Array P420 should work fine in your machine. This is a PCIe card with two connectors (2x 4 drives). Keep in mind that you probably need longer SAS cables to reach the controller.

[mile140]

I attached a screen shot of the array config to show what we have.  Sorry again for not describing it correctly.. 

Many thanks for your help and pointing me in the right direction.  I am looking at  Smart Array P420  now to purchase and install.  

[PDP-Fan]

As I expected, you don't have a RAID-5 but two RAID-1 which is the only possibility with 4 disks. If you change the "logical view" to "physical view", then it will display the drives that are in each logical drive. So you can check if there is a problem with a drive and which one it is.... just in case the drive LED's are not indicating a problem.

Make sure your P420 comes with a cache module, HP calls it "Array Accelerator", and a battery/supercap. Some operations like expanding volumes will not work without it.

[SanjeevGoyal]

Hello,

You cannot expand the array with the B series Smart Array Controllers or do not allow for this functionality. This option is available on most P series Smart Array Controllers.

HP Dynamic Smart Array B120i/B320i Controller - No Option to Expand Array in ACU

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=c03696353&docLocale=en_US