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March 16th, 2011 12:00
Adding Larger Drives
i have a MD3000i with all slots filled with 300GB 15K drives with 2 hot spares and i am starting to run low on space. i have a few questions bleow.
1. can i change out one existing 300GB drive with a larger (1.50TB) one and let it rebuild, i assume it will only use 300GB.
2. keep doing step 1 until all drives are replaced with larger drives.
3. And now if i did steps 1 & 2 and had all new 1.5TB drives installed that are only using 300GB each would there be a way to expand or force the drives to use the 1.5TB?
I am tring to not add another cabinet in a full rack and i am out of rack space and no room to add another rack.
any ideas?
Thank you in advance and Have a Great Day!
PlanoTexasGuy
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JOHNADCO
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March 16th, 2011 15:00
I don't think you can reclaim the space onthe drives. I think your going to need an MD1000 even if only temporary to do this using block level tools.
Dev Mgr
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March 16th, 2011 15:00
This is only partially possible.
You cannot mix SAS and SATA drives in a diskgroup, therefor you can only swap that 300GB SAS drive with another SAS drive (e.g. 600GB/15k rpm).
The largest 15k SAS drives are 600GB currently.
You could swap it for a Nearline SAS drive, but those spin at 7200rpm, which will be significantly slower than your current 15k drives and could therefor cause a performance hit.
There is the option to get an MD1000 from Dell and daisy chain it off of the MD3000i. For this you do need to have 2 controllers in the MD3000i and the MD1000 would need to be purchased with 2 EMMs (seems to be default on their website) and 2 SAS cables (does not seem to be the default). Adding this enclosure would take downtime, but would allow you to add more drives (up to 15) in a 2nd enclosure without needing to configure another SAN or so.
PlanoTexasGuy
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March 16th, 2011 15:00
DEV MGR,
i could get by very well with just replacing the 300GB to 600GB drives if their is a way to do what i said in my original post. but i don't have the space to add a MD1000. do you have any ideas as to resources/documents on how to expand the drives once i have replaced them one at a time and let them rebuild one at a time.
anymore info/ideas would be great.
Thank you for the reply and suggestions!
Dev Mgr
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March 17th, 2011 07:00
I have never done it on a PowerVault (have done it on an EMC SAN), but I would think that after replacing all the drives (one at a time with a full rebuild in between), the diskgroup will recognize the extra space so you can use it to create additional virtual disks or grow existing virtual disks.
JOHNADCO
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847 Posts
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March 17th, 2011 09:00
I don't think so.... But, if this is true. I'd love to know the exact proceedure.
I have a scenerio right now, Where I have a tray of 750gb and 1tb drives all configured as one raid 5. I'd love to reclaim the space, I could easily get the additional 1tb drives. But I was told before (dell tech support) there was no way to get the space back with out copy'n the VD's off and changing then copy'n back.
John S.