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October 1st, 2013 10:00

AX4-5i re-use 1TB SATA drives

I am still using my dell branded AX4-5i for a few more months until my new storage comes online. I seem to be having more and more hard drive failures, and at $1000 a pop, it's getting harder and harder to squeeze money out of management to keep this thing going. 

Quite some time ago, I swapped 48 of my 1TB SATA drives for 2TB drives. I still have all the 1TB drives I removed. I would like to at least consider using these to replace drives as they fail, but I'm not sure what will happen if I insert a drive into the system that isn't blank...I didn't wipe these drives or nuke the LUNs that existed on them prior to removing them, so there is likely some residual data/formatting.

Any suggestions? 

thanks

Moderator

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7.6K Posts

October 1st, 2013 14:00

Hello vacantstare,

As long as you didn’t destroy the luns and remade them when you upgraded the drives then you should be able to insert your 1TB drives into the AX4-5 & get them to work again.  If you did make changes to the Luns & then when you insert the drive it will power it up then once it sees that there is not enough space for it to rebuild the data then it will power off the drive & mark it as bad.  As for the data that is on the drives once it is inserted into the AX4-5 it will wipe it & then put the data on it from the Luns that it is part of.  

Please let us know if you have any other questions.  

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9.3K Posts

October 1st, 2013 22:00

Note  that the first 4 drives in the AX4-5i itself have to go back exactly into the slots that they came from or the OS on the storage processors will not boot.

1 Message

April 10th, 2014 03:00

I also have an AX4-5i, and am looking to purchase some replacement 1TB drives.  Interested?  My network is down completely, so quite urgent.

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7.6K Posts

April 10th, 2014 06:00

Hello cloudman108,

You will need to make sure that you get EMC certified drive to replace with.  Also you will need to make sure that if you are replacing the flare drives (first 5) that you replace them 1 at a time to ensure that you don’t lose your OS on the AX4-5i.

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

1 Message

August 7th, 2015 19:00

Hello Vacanstare,

Do you still have the AX4-5 1TB's?   I would interested in buying them,  our systems is in constant need of 1tbs.

Thank you

August 11th, 2015 17:00

I'm afraid I don't- we retired our AX4-5i some time ago, and my employer requires that all drives be degaussed/destroyed.

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