EMC VNX DAE 5300 and disks

an no - you cannot just put in any disk - the disk ID and firmware has to match the EMC drives

3TB is the largest NL-SAS drive that was qualified and supported on the 5300

The largest disks for VNX5300 are 4TB, e.g. TLA 005050748. If you check the parts compatibility guide these are supported from 5.31 and up.

But as Rainer stated, the disk ID and firmware has to match the EMC drives.

Just a small note: I'm using the shelf with a simple LSI/Avago SAS card as a simple JBOD without any other EMC parts.

So I still can't use 3rd party >3 TB disks?

The problem you face is that any disks from EMC are formatted differently then normal off--the-shelf SAS disks. They are made to run with the software on the VNX. So if you take a host and hook up a HBA adapter to the DAE then if the disks are EMC branded it probably won't work. The DAE is normally set up to run in arbitrated loop.

It might with non-EMC disks. But this is something that EMC can't support. Other posts that I've seen on the EMC forums have tried this and I know of at least one person that got it running. You might want to search in the forums.

glen

Yeah, I got the disks with the special format. You can just install sg3_utils and use sg_format to format those disks to 512Kb per sectors and it works.

hetz wrote: Just a small note: I'm using the shelf with a simple LSI/Avago SAS card as a simple JBOD without any other EMC parts. So I still can't use 3rd party >3 TB disks?

As far as I know that was never how the DAE was intended to be used.

So it may or may not work

You are on uncharted territory here.. If the check for EMC branded drives is in the controller firmware then 3rd party drives are not going to work. Your best bet is to just give it a try.

Like Glen stated the EMC disks are formatted differently (820 Byte sectors), but this may be transparent to the host.

If you are going to use this for some production environment, just get some generic SAS/SATA chassis like a supermicro 836, which will definitely work.

hetz wrote: Yeah, I got the disks with the special format. You can just install sg3_utils and use sg_format to format those disks to 512Kb per sectors and it works.

sure - but the drives will still have EMC OEM firmware on them that is different from retail drives

and different default SCSI settings - for example raid controllers dont want the drives to do lengthy retries like TLER