MSA 2052 replace drives with larger disks

[ePicNet]

Hi,

I have an MSA 2052 with 3 disk enclosures, all drive bays are populated with 1TB drives. Due to space limitations in the rack, I cannot add another enclosure. Is it possible to replace a 1TB drive with a 2TB drive, wait for the array to rebuild before replacing the next drive, etc, etc. Once all drives are replaced with 2TB drives, would that space then be available for expanding volumes?

Kind regards

[support_s]

System recommended content:

1. HPE MSA 2052 SAN Storage - Product Information Reference | Product features

2. Microsoft SQL Server 2017 OLTP Workloads on HPE MSA 2052 Storage using the Linux operating system

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[venkat_y]

Hello@ePicNet,

Yes, it's possible to replace the 1TB drives in your system with 2TB drives one at a time and wait for the array to rebuild before replacing the next drive. Additional space will be available for expanding volumes once all drives are replaced with 2TB drives.
Please use the below link for all HPE MSA 2052 storage specifications,
https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=a00017823en_us&docLocale=en_US 

Hope this helps!
Regards,
Venkat

[JonPaul]

@ePicNet 
The instruction previous is incorrect.  Replacing drives in an MSA 2050 (Gen5) disk group with larger drives will not change disk-group usable capacity.
The Gen5 MSA uses only traditional RAID sets (RAID 1, 10, 5 and 6) which determine a minimum drive capacity at creation of the disk-group.  'min-drive-size' is also the maximum capacity that will be used from any drive in the group, if adding a 2TB drive then only 1TB will be used even if all drives are replace with 2TB drives.  The only way to increase capacity in the Pool is to add a new disk-group.
Since you are limited on physical space, if you have enough available space in the Pool you can remove a disk-group (DRAIN) which will move all data on that disk-group to another disk-group in the Pool.  Once it is completely drained of data the disk-group will be removed and then you can replace the drives and create/add a new disk-group to the Pool of the new larger drives.  The drain process can take a very long time, please review documentation in Best Practice for guidance.
Note the Expansion enclosures, if you can find one, are able to be connected with up to 2m cables.

You can see you disk-group min-drive-size using the CLI:
CLI>  set cli-parameters json         {Sets the CLI output to an API output in JSON mode, this returns all data about the disk-group}
CLI>  show disk-groups <disk-group-name>    { Find min-drive-size } 
CLI>  set cli-parameters console   {Sets the CLI back to human output with limited details}

The MSA Gen6 alleviated this limitation by making the MSA-DP+ RAID level available.  MSA-DP+ allows incremental expansion and differing drive capacities.  More information see the MSA Gen6 Virtual Storage Technical Guide.