How do I add hard disks to the RAID 5 of the HPE MSA 2050?

[NIloHsu]

Hi Experts,

I have an HPE MSA 2050 with 12 2.4TB hard drives already doing Raid 5 + hot spare, now I want to add 4 more 2.4TB hard drives, but I can't find an option to allow me to do this , how do I do this?

2050 Firmware : VL270P003-01

Thank you.

[support_s]

System recommended content:

1. HPE MSA 1050/2050 SMU Reference Guide

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[JonPaul]

@NIloHsu 
You can't do what you want to do.  With virtual storage there is no way to incrementally expand a disk-groups.  You have a few options.
1. Expand with an equally sized disk-group in the same pool
2. Expand the Pool with another Tier
3. Create a second Pool and use the disk-groups there for specific I/O
4. Backup - recreate the new disk-group with all disks - restore
But First, please go out to the MSA HealthCheck site and get a report of the current state of your system in reguards to best practices:  https://www.hpe.com/Storage/MSAHealthcheck
Your firmware is out of date: current VL270P008
There are 2 other documents I would point you to,   
MSA Best Practices  https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00015961enw
MSA Virtual Storage Technical Reference:  https://www.hpe.com/psnow/doc/a00087404enw
Both should help in an understanding of the virtual storage and best practices on expansion.

[NIloHsu]

@JonPaul 

Hi JonPaul,
I see, I'm asking this because I had done adding hard drives in RAID 5 on the MSA 2040 a while back.
I checked a little bit, so it is because 2050 does not support linear storage?
And 2040 supports linear storage, so it can add hard drives?
Appreciate your answer, thank you.

[JonPaul · Accepted solution]

@NIloHsu 
You are correct. The Gen 4 MSA (1040/2040/2042) did allow for Linear storage where each disk-group(VDISK) was independent and expansion of a disk-group was possible, up to 16 disks for RAID 5.
The Gen 5 MSA (1050/2050/2052) only supports virtual storage and does not support expansion of the individual disk-groups. Wide-striping with the same size disk-group or addition of another tier for expansion are your options. If you add a performance tier, be sure to account for the license required.
The Gen 6 MSA (1060/2060/2062) only supports virtual storage as well but has added a new RAID level: MSA-DP+  this RAID level adds a few new features among which is the ability to incrementally expand the disk-group, up to 128 drives.
Other features: built in spare capacity, all data stripes in the Power of 2 configuration, slot affinity rebuilds.