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Hot replacing good drives from DAEs
We have a need to replace some SAS drives with SATA. My plan is to take an existing 4+1 RD5 raid group of SAS and firstly destroy that raid group (data no longer needed). Subsequently i will set those 5 drives as hot spares. Can I then just pull those drives out of the DAE live and replace them with the required SATA ones ? or is this a system down function ?
thanks.
Storagesavvy
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November 13th, 2011 16:00
Before you do this...
Are these 5 drives the ONLY disks in that DAE? On CX4 and older (ie: everything except VNX) you cannot mix SATA and FC disks in the same DAE. Remove ALL FC disks from the DAE before inserting ANY SATA disks.
Before removing the disks, unbind any LUNs that are in RAID Groups that use those disks, then destroy the RAID Groups. Do not make the disks into Hot spares or anything else. They must appear as unused disks ready to be used for new RAID Groups. After that you can remove the disks from the DAE. Again be sure to remove ALL FC disks from the DAE before inserting ANY SATA disks, otherwise you could run into a data-unavailable event.
The old guidance was that you should zero out the disks before removing them, I've heard this is not really a requirement but if you plan to put those FC disks into another array, you might want to do it. There is a navicli command you can use to start the zeroing process on each disk. It will take several hours to complete.
Hope that helps.
Richard J Anderson
dynamox
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November 11th, 2011 20:00
these 5 drives should not be in any raid groups nor configured as hot spares. You can safely pull them out and replace with SATA drive online. If you see some goofiness in Unisphere you might need to start management server (http://spa/setup ..online process too)
andyxzyk1
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November 13th, 2011 14:00
thanks dynamox, I shall try this and report back. The reply I had from EMC 'support' after opening a support case was that they need to be assigned as hot spares first, but I'm not convinced this is needed. I think they thought I was after simply reseating the drives, not replacing from one type to another which is what i want to do.
Storagesavvy
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November 13th, 2011 16:00
Oh, and after you remove the drives, if they still show up as installed, or there are errors you can't clear, then follow Dynamox's advice to restart the management servers (not the SPs, just the Navisphere/Unisphere Management server in the /setup page.) That should clear up the ghost objects and alerts, then you can install the new drives.
andyxzyk1
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November 14th, 2011 06:00
thanks guys, tested it and working. I only had to unbind all luns on that raid group and destroy the raid group. After that i was able to remove one of my SAS drives and replace it with a SATA and all is fine the clariion world.
Thanks for your support guys !