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Move disks in DL380 G9

 
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tomereynolds
Occasional Advisor

Move disks in DL380 G9

I have a HP DL380 G9 with the built in P440ar controller.   I have the server os on disks 1,2 raid 1.   Other disks 3-9 in other raids.   Is it possible to move 5 disks, in RAID 5, from slots 10,11, 14,15,24 to slots 20,21,22,23,(24)?

Simply said, I need to move an existing RAID 5 array of 5 disks, from the middle slots to the right side of the server, without loosing any data.   

If I pop out disk 10, and move it to slot 24, it gets detected as a new disk, and I can add it to "heal" the array, but this process re-stripes it and takes time and does not benifit from the fact that the data I want is already stripped on the disk.

How can I move disks in slots 10,11, 14,15, (24) to slots 20-24 while keeping the array intact?

Thanks.

 

 

3 REPLIES 3
Iain Kirk
Occasional Advisor
Solution

Re: Move disks in DL380 G9

I have done this a number of times over various generation of ML/DL servers back to around G6.  I haven't tried doing it hot though, but if you power down the server and then move them you should have no problem, it should detect them fine.  A friend of mine who teaches some break fix on HP servers told me that as part of one of the examples he used to show was to shut down a (test) server with 3 different raid arrays, take all the disks out mix them all up and put them back in in any order, as the config for the arrays is stored on the disks themselves as well as the controller.  He would then fire the server back up and all would be as it was before.

Now, I'm not offering any sort of guarantee, and as always do a backup first, but in my experince i would expect it to be fine.

Jimmy Vance
HPE Pro

Re: Move disks in DL380 G9

Curious as to why you want to move them. 

As Iain stated, power the server off and then move the drives. When powering back up the controller will see the changed drive positions and update accordingly.   The array information is stored on each disk (not the controller). During POST you should see a message that the drives have been moved and the array information updated.

Standard disclaimer: make sure you have a valid backup before you start messing around with drives and arrays.

NOTE: I don't recall what generation started allowing for drives to be shuffled around to different bays, but it wasn't always this way. 

 

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tomereynolds
Occasional Advisor

Re: Move disks in DL380 G9

>   I haven't tried doing it hot though, but if you power down the server and then move them you should have no problem,

Great idea, thank you.  I have been doing all my testing hot, so trying it powered off makes a lot of sense.   
I will test this first thing tomorrow and update a status.

EDIT:  Powering off the server resolved my issue.