What firmware update to update first - controller or disk?

Oh sorry about that.

Current firmware is V5.1.2 and need to go to V6.0.1 (latest)

Thanks for the info. I will mark your response as the answer.

Just need advise. So if I have 5 members of a group, will I have to update all at the same time. What I want to do is move one member at a time to a mainenance pool and update the firmware, give it a reboot and introduce it back to the pool. Since all members have lot of data, the process of moving each into a maintenance pool can not be accomplished in one go. Can I update a member per week? This way we can avoid an outage. So it will take 5 weekends to completely get all members updated and in the same version. Will that work?

Ok that’s good as it will only take one step to get to the latest. So yes, you are on the right path. Evict the member from the group then do the update to 6.0.1. Do the reboot and then add the member back into the group. You are correct that with a lot of data it will take a while to do the moving of the member. So if you did one member every weekend that will be fine. You may also want to download the  PDF  for the upgrade process so if you have any questions during the process. It is available when you log into support.equallogic.com and go to downloads and select the 6.0.1 version.

To be able to answer this to the best of my ability I will need to know what firmware version the members are currently at and what version you are wanting to go to?

Moving each member one at a time to a maintenance pool, performing the FW update, restart the member (to complete the FW update), update the drive FW (if needed), then move the member back into the production pool should work according to your plan.

The time it takes to move a member can vary based on the amount of data on the member and array I/O, but taking a few weeks to do this shouldn't be an issue and is typical for groups with multiple array members and large amounts of data stored on them.

-joe

Thanks to both of you for your responses. Much appreciated.

One last question, once the member is updated with the latest firmware and it is introduced back into the pool, how will EqualLogic balance the data across?

I am quite new to EqualLogic. So need to understans the mechanics of it.

It will stripe the data across all members in proportion to their relative sizes.  So the largest member will get the majority of the data.   As space is used more on some members, the arrays will rebalance blocks as a background process.