HP Netserver LC3 RAID Expansion

[Jeff Barthlow]

NetRaid 1 controller...
LC3 has only 3 half-height hot-swap shelves; which are populated with 3-9.1gb drives...RAID-5
Want to expand disk array, but no available hot swap bay... there is, however, a half-height shelf immediately above the hot swap shelves... Can an internal drive of same size be added into this half-height shelf and added to the existing physical and eventually logical partition?

[Theo Hill_1 · Accepted solution]

No this will not work. The backplane assigns the HDD SCSI ID's, so the drive will not work.

[Jeff Barthlow]

thanks, Theo!

[e4services]

Not true. The three trays in the HP NetServer LC 3 hot swap subsystem have SCSI addresses preset to 1, 0, and 3 from left to right, as viewed from the front of the HP NetServer. If you have a non-hot-swap SCSI device with SCSI address 0, 1, or 3, change it or change the SCSI addresses on the hot swap subsystem so that they do not conflict. To change the hot-swap SCSI addresses, move the switches on the rear of the hot-swap subsystem.
So, you must SET the SCSI ID on the fixed hard drive, and you must set it to an ID that does not conflict with an existing device. Just check your SCSI BIOS boot or go to the SCSISelect utility press the CTRL and A keys at the same time at boot

[Terri Harris]

Actually you are both right, essentially. In the hot swap model of the LC3, the 3 half-height hot swap drive bay SCSI IDs are set by the backplane. The default SCSI ID scheme is (from left to right) ID # 1, 0, 3). But there are switches on the back of the backplane allowing this SCSI id numbering to be changed to (from left to right) ID # 1, 2, 3.

These switches are documented in the LC3 technical reference card, available here:
http://h200002.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/lpn11685/lpn11685.pdf

BUT, since the common tray drive will not be on the same channel as the hot swap drives, there is no SCSI ID conflict.

Which NetRAID card do you have? Do you have an available NetRAID channel for the common tray hard drive? If so, you may be able to add a common tray drive to your existing RAID 5. But combining hot swap and common tray drives in the same RAID array was not tested by HP.

Note: One RAID array can be configured on more then one channel of a NetRAID controller. However there is no option to configure one RAID array across more than one NetRAID controller.