Adding new disk to P410i Controller using ACU

[Don Davies]

Dear all,

Hope someone can help.  I have a DL380 G7 with P410i smart array controller.  Initially we had 3 160GB disk installed. The first two are configured for Array A (RAID 1) and contain the operating system (Redhat Linux). The third is used as a data disk and so is configured as Array B (Raid 0).  This data disk is now full.  The customer has purchased a new 1TB disk and installed this in Slot 4.  I wish to make this disk available as an additional data disk.

I've downloaded and installed the latest ACU (cpqacuex-9.40-12.0).  When I run this I can see the new disk marked as unassigned.  However if I go to the controller configuration option I was expecting see a Create Array option but I only get the options for Controller Settings, Physical Drive write Cache settings and More information. I assumed I could create a new Array C and add the new disk to it so that it shows as a new physical disk.

Amy thoughts on how I might add this new disk.  Will running ACU from the SmartStart CD at boot time give me the Create array option.

Any help gratefully received. Thanks in anticipation.

[Torsten.]

If you don't have a cache module installed, you can only have 2 logical drives.

See

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13201_div/13201_div.pdf

[Don Davies]

Torsten,  thanks for the reply. Looks like I'll have to retire the 160GB disk and replace with the larger one.

[waaronb]

You could always add a cache module to the controller. It makes a pretty big difference. A 512MB FBWC option doesn't cost all that much. Probably more than a lot of consumer SATA drives, but you do get some performance boosts by having the cache module.

[Nicolai Rasmussen]

Another option is to replace the two 160gb (the ones in RAID-1) with bigger drives.

You can replace them one at a time (allow array to rebuild inbetween).

This will give you extra space in the array that you could use to offload the data from the single RAID-0 drive.

Note that (unfortunately) in order to utilize the new space (expand array) you will ALSO need a FBWC/BBWC module added to the controller, so either way, you need to spend some ca$h.

You could then re-use one of the 160gb drives to convert the RAID-0 array to a RAID-1, to add data security ;-)