Upgrading Hard Drive Capacity; Moving Drives And Arrays - HP 381513-B21 - Smart Array P800 Controller RAID User Manual

Upgrading hard drive capacity

You can increase the storage capacity on a system even if there are no available drive bays by swapping
drives one at a time for higher capacity drives. This method is viable as long as a fault-tolerance method
is running.
CAUTION:
configuration, the system is unprotected against drive failure for many hours while a given
drive is upgraded. Perform drive capacity upgrades only during periods of minimal system
activity.
To upgrade hard drive capacity:
Back up all data.
1.
Replace any drive. The data on the new drive is re-created from redundant information on the
2.
remaining drives.
CAUTION:
When data rebuild on the new drive is complete, the Online/Activity LED stops flashing steadily and
either flashes irregularly or glows steadily.
Repeat the previous step for the other drives in the array, one at a time.
3.
When you have replaced all drives, you can use the extra capacity to either create new logical drives or
extend existing logical drives. For more information about these procedures, refer to the HP Array
Configuration Utility User Guide.

Moving drives and arrays

You can move drives to other ID positions on the same array controller. You can also move a complete
array from one controller to another, even if the controllers are on different servers.
Before you move drives, the following conditions must be met:
The server must be powered down.
If moving the drives to a different server, the new server must have enough empty bays to
accommodate all the drives simultaneously.
The array has no failed or missing drives, and no spare drive in the array is acting as a replacement
for a failed drive.
The controller is not running capacity expansion, capacity extension, or RAID or stripe size
migration.
The controller is using the latest firmware version (recommended).
If you want to move an array to another controller, all drives in the array must be moved at the same time.
When all the conditions have been met:
Back up all data before removing any drives or changing configuration. This step is required if you
1.
are moving data-containing drives from a controller that does not have a battery-backed cache.
Power down the system.
2.
Move the drives.
3.
Because it can take up to 15 minutes per gigabyte to rebuild the data in the new
Do not replace any other drive until data rebuild on this drive is complete.
Replacing, moving, or adding hard drives 31