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October 14th, 2021 12:00
PS6000 in place drive upgrade
Is it possible to do an in place upgrade/replacement of hard drives without having to rebuild the array?
Right now we have 16x500 GB drives, I want to replace all the drives with 1TB versions, effectively doubling the capacity. In some other SANs I have used there is an option to migrate data off the lower capacity drives to larger ones and once completed expand the array.
I have not seen any options for this. Right now the Array policy is RAID 50, and in theory I should be able to break that into two RAID 5 arrays and then replace half the drives and migrate the data swap out the other set of drives and recreate the RAID 50, but I don't see any options to do that.
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DELL-Josh Cr
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October 14th, 2021 16:00
Hi Matthew,
I was not able to find an official guide to in place drive upgrades, but it may work. I am not sure you can split the raid 50. Page 20 https://dell.to/3FQNFqX also we do not recommend using RAID 50 with disks 1TB or larger. Let us know if you have any other questions.
Matthew Kruer
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October 15th, 2021 08:00
I am looking over documentation and I am not seeing anything that will help. I was looking for something that would force the replication onto the new drive so I could pull the old one and replace this one at a time.
DELL-Charles R
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October 15th, 2021 10:00
Hello Matthew,
Unlike a PERC controller, there is not expand volume option on EqualLogic.
You would need to move the data, erase the volume the recreate the volume and move the data back.
dwilliam62
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October 17th, 2021 09:00
Hello,
You can't spit the RAIDset as the data is stripped across the two RAIDsets.
You CAN install larger drives one at a time let the rebuild finish then move on to the next one. It is NOT recommended as you will constantly be rebuilding and run risk of double faulting one of the RAID5 LUNs. Especially with older drive. I would not even consider it until you have change the RAID policy to RAID6.
A couple of things to note. 1) You can't use off the shelf or OEM drives in a PS Series SAN. The drives have to be specifically made for EQL. They are marked in a specific way so they will be recognized as EQL drives. it is not the firmware or MFR part number. 2.) This process will take a long time. I would make sure you have a VERIFIED backup of all the data. 3.) If you are running older firmware, then risk of double faulting is higher
EQL 1TB drives are going to be very old. You might want to look for a 2TB EQL drives.
Good luck.
Regards,
Don