DL380 Gen 10 - HDD disk replacement with SSD

[David94]

Hi,

We have a Proliant DL380 Gen10 server.
An HPE Smart Array P408i-a SR card.
Two 300 GB HDD disks in Raid 1.

We purchased three 1.6 TB SSD drives to increase capacity and to have a spare.
We wish :

- Change the 1st disk hot and wait for its reconstruction
- Change the 2nd disk hot and wait for its reconstruction
- Repartition the disk to recover extra space.
- Add the spare

However, when we wanted to change the first 300 GB disk with a 1.6 TB SSD, the new disk went into "Unavailable/Offline" status.
Do you know if this is normal? Do you know how we can change the disk status?

Thanks in advance for your help

[David94]

On the other hand, if I disk it in another disk location, then it is recognized and active

[Arnaud Delaloy · Accepted solution]

hello,

 unfortunately,  an online upgrade fro mHDD to SSD by drive swap won't work :  you have this kind of message because in SmartArrays cards within the same logical array you cannot mix HDDs and SSDs

(there are way too much difference in technology to manage in the same array such as TRIM/unmap in SSDs, and faulty sectors in HDDs)

but this storage conversion might be done offline :

if it's for the system disks,  the safest way to is backup the system, remove the HDD disks, plug in the SSDs and  recreate a new RAID1  logical array with the SSDs ( check the boot order) then restore the OS on the new logical drive.

or if its a data disk, add the SSDs next tothe HDDs to create a RAID1 logical array and   by using the Operating system's  logical mirroring ( LVM for luinux or mirroded dynamic disk for windows) but even that might require downtime to convert the drive letter to dynamic in Windows.

and by experience, all of that is easier said than done...

[David94]

Good morning,

Your message confirms the actions we predicted. We will apply strategy 1, backup, change disks and restore.

A big thank you for your reply,

[Sunitha_Mod]

Hello @David94,

That's Awesome! 

We are extremely glad to know the problem has been resolved and we appreciate you for keeping us posted.