MSL4048 - LTO-5/LTO-6 Drive Upgrades

[sgunelius]

Good afternoon.  We currently have (2) MSL4048 and each library has 2 x LTO-4 (1840) drives connected to our 4Gbps FC fabric.  We're looking at replacing the 1840 drives with LTO-5 (4 x 3000 or 2 x 3280) or LTO-6 (2 x 6250).  Has anyone done a similar upgrade in the field with their MSL4048?  Were there any "gotchas" that I should be aware of?

I know with LTO-6 drives, we'll only be able to read (not write) to our existing LTO-4 media, while LTO-5 drives will support read/write to the LTO-4 media.  As we'd like to take full advantage of the capacity and performance improvements of LTO-5 or 6, I was told to disregard the cost of acquiring new media.  I'll see where that goes once we have a better understanding of that investment in consumables.

[Mr_NKC]

Hello,

I don't think there is anything specific that you need to be aware of before the drive upgrade.  However, you might want to have a look at the document below

HP StoreEver 1/8 G2 Tape Autoloader and MSL Tape Libraries Fibre Channel Tape Drive Upgrade and Replacement

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c02524671

In case, you would like to configure failover on your LTO-5 or LTO-6 drives, please review the failover guide before you do so

HP StoreEver Tape Libraries Failover User Guide

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c04325872.pdf

Hope this helps.

[Torsten.]

The MSL4048 has 4 HH drive slots, so you can even mix the drives.

However, if you would like to replace existing drives, I would first update the firmware, swap the drives and if the lib is complaining about the missing drive do a reset to factory defaults.