MD1000 expansion enclosure (Hard Drives status)

An MD1000 in a DAS setup (attached to a PERC5E or PERC6E) has low requirements for drives; pretty much any drive will work.

Make sure your MD1000 has at least the A03 firmware and that your MD3000i is fairly up to date in it's firmware (to be compatible with the MD1000).

To use drives on an MD3000/MD3000i, the drives need to be certified, but if they are SATA drives they also need to have the interposer board on the drives to allow them to be able to communicate with both raid controllers at the same time.

I'd suggest to pull one of the drives out and look at the connector side of the drive; if it just the drive, it is missing the interposer board. However, if you see an electronic board on the end of the drive, that would be the interposer board.

I am reviewing about your comments and am showing the hard drives firmware version and product id:

DRIVES------------------------------

   SUMMARY

      Number of physical disks: 30

         Current physical disk types: Serial ATA (SATA) (15), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) (15)

      BASIC:

         TRAY, SLOT  STATUS        CAPACITY      TYPE  CURRENT DATA RATE  PRODUCT ID                                FIRMWARE VERSION  

         1, 0        Optimal       1,863.017 GB  SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA722020ALA330                   JKAOA25C          

         1, 1        Optimal       1,863.017 GB  SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA722020ALA330                   JKAOA25C          

         1, 2        Optimal       1,863.017 GB  SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA722020ALA330                   JKAOA25C          

         1, 3        Optimal       1,863.017 GB  SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA722020ALA330                   JKAOA25C          

         1, 4        Optimal       1,863.017 GB  SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA722020ALA330                   JKAOA25C          

         1, 5        Optimal       1,863.017 GB  SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA722020ALA330                   JKAOA25C          

         1, 6        Optimal       1,863.017 GB  SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA722020ALA330                   JKAOA25C          

         1, 7        Incompatible  931.513 GB    SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA721010KLA330                   GKAOAJ0A          

         1, 8        Incompatible  931.513 GB    SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA721010KLA330                   GKAOAJ0A          

         1, 9        Incompatible  931.513 GB    SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA721010KLA330                   GKAOAJ0A          

         1, 10       Incompatible  931.513 GB    SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA721010KLA330                   GKAOAJ0A          

         1, 11       Incompatible  931.513 GB    SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA721010KLA330                   GKAOAJ0A          

         1, 12       Incompatible  931.513 GB    SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA721010KLA330                   GKAOAJ0A          

         1, 13       Optimal       931.513 GB    SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA721010KLA330                   GKAOAJ0A          

         1, 14       Optimal       931.513 GB    SATA  3 Gbps             Hitachi HUA721010KLA330                   GKAOAJ0A 

I can understand that these hard drives 1,7-11 are identical to the 1,13-14 but the problem is the Incompatible  status.

Those drives were in a Virtual disk raid5 in DAS storage (before swapping disk in MD1000 iscsi enclosure). I dont know if is necesary to "clear" some configuration.

Thanks in advance

Did you check one of those drives to see if they have the interposer board on them? If not, that would be the reason they are marked as "incompatible".

Yes, The hard drives have  the interposer board....

mmm

I was trying to initialize hard drives but the problem is the same. I am using CLI commands:

Performing syntax check...

Syntax check complete.

Executing script...

An error occurred initializing physical disk[1, 8] at line 1.

Error 410 - A physical disk operation cannot be performed because the state of t

he physical disk is inappropriate for the requested operation.

The command at line 1 that caused the error is:

start physicalDisk [1,8] initialize;

Script execution halted due to error.

SMcli failed.

Hi!

I moved a hard drive on MD1000 DAS and made a "clear" (hard drive clear), after that I returned the hard drive to the MD1000 iscsi and the hard drive status changed to "Unassigned".

I think that is necessary to clear the hard drives configuration on MD1000 iscsi expansion, but i dont know how do it.

Any suggestion?

Thanks

Clarifying some of my assumptions:

 1) The drives were originally in an MD1000 that was used as an expansion for an MD3000

2) They were then moved to an MD1000 that was used as an expansion for an MD3000i

The first thing here that can cause problems is the firmware version. If the MD3000 (DAS) box was of version 07.xx.xx.xx and MD3000i of version 06.xx.xx.xx, then you will have to format the disk in some other place (maybe an MD1000 connected to a PERC). This is because you are trying to move disks with new metadata to a system with older metadata.

The other thing that can cause problems is that the disks are not exported. There is an option in the MD Storage Manager to export a Disk Group (or place a disk group offline.. depending on the version). This will ensure that the disks are prepared to be moved out of the array. Once the disks are exported, they can be easily imported into the new array as long as the firmware version is the same series (i.e. both are 06.xx or both are 07.xx)

Hope this helps..

Mohan