Help with PV650F flare drive migration

There are a few ways that will work.

One option:
- have a (redundant) data LUN bound on the 3 drives (more than just these 3 is fine too)
- swap 1 drive at a time and let each rebuild all the way
Notes: If you currently don't have any LUNs on these 3 drives, just bind a single 2GB (putting 1 GB on each drive) raid 5. This is quick to rebuild and does what it needs to. After you're done swapping all 3 drives, delete the LUN and use the 'new' 36GB drives for new LUNs

Another option:
- power down the array
- replace drives 1 and 2 (leaving drive 0) and power up the array
- Give the system a few minutes to let it mirror the flare to drives 1 and 2 (10 minutes should be a 'safe' time to assume it's finished (except for monitoring the drive activity lights I don't know of a reliable way to determine if it's finished, and I'd be conservative with determining if it's no longer blinking))
- Power down and move drive 1 or 2 to slot 0
- put in the 3rd 36GB drive into the opened slot
- power up
- give the system a few minutes again to rebuild the triple mirror

The first option is more 'reliable' in my opinion, but only because it's easier to see when the rebuild is finished. Both should work fine tho.

Do keep track of those 3 18GB drives, because if after the swap if you find the unit will not boot to any flare, you will have to revert back to your 18's to see what the problem is with the 36's (only thing I can think of is if the 36's are formatted at 512 bytes/sector instead of the required 520 bytes/sector (the firmware version makes it likely that they are 520, but it's not a guarantee).

The flare is a 3-drive mirror. With normal data LUNs you'll see the rebuild in the data admin event logs. The flare I don't believe you'll see logged in the event logs if it has finished adding mirrors.

The 'rebuild' doesn't always happen right away (I ran into this), even if you see what looks like it is disk activity for a rebuild. After having swapped all 3 drives 1 at a time (w/o a data LUN on there), I decided to reboot the array with the 3 'new' drives to make sure it worked, and the array wouldn't boot. I ended up finding out that it mirrors the flare for sure (easily recognizable) at boot and when it rebuilds a data LUN. Swapping 1 drive at a time w/o a data LUN forcing an immediate rebuild may work, but not sure what kind of wait time you will have to calculate for.

Hi Dev Mgr,

Do you know what happen to the download link of firmware of DE84?

Where can we get it again?

Thanks.

I have no idea. I did a search for DE84 on the Dell site, and find a few hits, but when you try to follow them, they say the file is no longer available. I don't know the filename that it had, as you could try the Dell FTP server and look there for the filename.