Expand storage on hPE Nimble

[mpowis]

We currently have a HPE Nimble with all bays filled, the current 3.5" bays have 21 x 1TB drives installed but i want to increase capacity, i put a 4TB drive in one slot and now I'm getting an error message.

Disk of size 4000GB is the wrong size on head AF-180139 at slot 4. this needs to be 1000GB disk

[Satish04]

Hi mpowis,

In an HPE Nimble AF series storage array, all drives within a given drive type (e.g., 3.5" NL-SAS) need to be of the same capacity. Mixing drives of different capacities within the same drive type is not supported.

Based on the error message you received, it seems that the 4TB drive you inserted into slot 4 is not compatible with the existing drives in the array, which are 1TB in size. This inconsistency in drive capacities can cause issues with the array's operation and may result in errors or failure to recognize the drive.

To increase the capacity of your HPE Nimble AF series array, you will need to replace the existing 1TB drives with drives of the desired larger capacity. This ensures uniformity and compatibility across all drives in the array.

To check the HPE Nimble Storage compatibility information, please visit below URLs

https://infosight.hpe.com/tenant/Nimble.Tenant.0018000000ovsdmAAA/resources/nimble/validated-configuration-matrix

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/search-results.html?q=Nimble+AF+series+drive+compatibility+metrics&autocomplete=0

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Satish

[Sheldon Smith]

The drives in the head shelf cannot be changed out. Replacing the drives would lose ALL your data.

To expand the storage of an HPE Nimble HF40 system, you must add an expansion shelf (HPE NS HF4/60 ES3 CTO Shelf) which comes fully populated with 21 HDDs and cache SSDs. 

The expansion shelves are 4U high and come with 1 meter SAS cables. 

[Sunitha_Mod]

Hello @mpowis,

Let us know if you were able to resolve the issue.

If you have no further query and you are satisfied with the answer then kindly mark the topic as Solved so that it is helpful for all community members.

[TrentW]

I am having the exact same problem. We are thnking about replacing all 1TB HDD drives in our Nimble with 4TB SSD drives. Will this work? Does the Nimble HF20 series support SSD drives as main storage? Obviously it still has the cache drives, but we want all of our storage moved to FLASH as well. I know replacing the 1TB drives with bigger HDD's will work fine, but I am wondering about replacing them with SSD's instead.

Thank you.

[Sunitha_Mod]

Hello @TrentW,

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