Guidelines For The Drive Installation - HPE 3PAR StoreServ 9000 Customer Self Install Manual

Procedure
1. Review Guidelines for the drive installation on page 22.
2. Complete Installing the SFF drives on page 23.

Guidelines for the drive installation

IMPORTANT: The guidelines for how the drives are installed, allocated, and balanced are critical to
the performance and reliability of your storage system.
CAUTION:
• To ensure proper thermal control, slot-filler blanks are provided with the enclosures and must be
inserted in all unused drive bays in the enclosure. Operate the enclosure only when all drive
bays are populated with either a drive or a blank.
• If the storage system is enabled with the Data-at-Rest (DAR) encryption feature, only use
Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) capable encrypted drives.
• Before installing drives into enclosures, make sure that the enclosures are free of obstructions
(such as loose screws, hardware, or debris). Inspect the drives before installing them in the
enclosure to make sure that they are not damaged.
• To avoid errors when powering on the storage system, all enclosures must have at least one pair
of identical drives installed by following the guidelines for installing, allocating, and balancing
drives.
• A pair or pairs of drives must be installed in consecutively numbered slots in a drive enclosure and
must be of the same capacity and speed.
• The recommended initial quantity is eight SSDs per controller node pair, with a required minimum of
six SSDs per controller node pair.
• With a four-node configuration, the best practice is to attach the same number of drives to each
controller node pair.
• All drive enclosures must contain an even number of drives, with a minimum of two.
• Try to distribute an equal number of drives in all drive enclosures. If an equal distribution is not
possible, get as close as possible while still following the guidelines for the drives.
• RAID 6 is strongly recommended for all drive types.
SFF drive loading guidelines and examples:
The small form factor (SFF) drives are loaded starting at bay 0, left to right, leaving no empty space
between drives. The bays are numbered 0 through 23.
NOTE: The top right bay in the SFF drive enclosure must not be used and is populated with a blank
panel.
22 Unpacking the factory-integrated-in-rack option: Process overview