MSA1000 - Replacing disk dirves

[Louann Duchemin]

I have 2 questions that maybe someon can answer.
1. I have a raid configuration made up of 4 32gig drives. One goes bad. It is replaced with a 72gig drive. We are taking the default on the size. What happens now that there is a 72gig in with a bunch of 32 gig drive?

2. If I replace a bad drive with a drive that is known to have data on it already. How do you init the drive?

[Uwe Zessin · Accepted solution]

1.) The other half of the 72 GigaByte disk drive is not available. You can make its space available by replacing the other 36 GigaByte disk drives with larger ones.

2.) I don't think you can. The controller will overwrite the disk automatically when you plug the disk in. But it is important that you do this while the MSA1000 is running!! Else, there is a certain risk that the controller picks up configuration information from the wrong disk during startup which can result in the loss of data. It is low, but greater than zero.

[Herman Sugeng_1]

Hallo Uwe,
I belive this will work, do you know if this is supported by HP?
The manuals only talking abouth adding disk so your array bacame bigger.
My problem is the MSA1000 is full so I intend to change 36G disk to 146G, 12 times.
Do you know how long it takes per disk?
Thanks in advance.
Best regards,

[Uwe Zessin]

Good question. You mean HP does not support it if you back up your data, delete the logical disk and disk drive array, swap the disk, recreate the array and logical disk and then restore the data?

Or did you think about an online replacement of the disks? (Rip out a smaller disk and let the controller rebuild on to a larger one)

I *know* I have seen this feature mentioned in documentation for SmartArray PCI backplane controllers, but I can't point you to an MSA1000 document if that's what you were asking.

(Aren't ambiguous answers great ;-)

[Greg Carlson]

Its not officially supported by HP, however it should work. Replacing disks one by one w/ larger capacity disks, theoretically after they have all rebuilt, then you should have freespace showing in the ACU to expand your array with. I've seen it work and I've also seen where they made it through 7 of 14 disks and at that point they lost access to the array/data. They were then at a restore. Which is the recommended HP migration for changing disk capacity in an array.

Also on point two,, like Uwe states, it would need to be added hot so that the controller isn't trying to pull the config off that drive and set up a mismatch condition.

Ciao,
Greg

HTH,
Greg