Guidelines For Adding Disk Drives; Creating Disk Groups; Disk Drive Activity Indicator - HP StorageWorks 6100 - Enterprise Virtual Array User Manual

Guidelines for adding disk drives

When adding new disk drives to the storage system, you should ensure that the disk drives are installed
in the correct positions to maintain availability. The disk drives should be distributed across the disk
enclosures to protect against the failure of a single disk enclosure.
Use the following guidelines when adding disk drives to your storage system:
• Install high performance and FATA disk drives in separate groups. These different drive types must
be in separate disk groups. You may also want to consider separating different drive capacities
and spindle speeds into different groups.
• High performance and FATA disk drives can be installed in the same disk enclosure.
• The disk drives should be distributed evenly across the disk enclosures. The number of disks of a
given type in each enclosure should not differ by more than one. For example, no enclosure should
have two disks until all the other enclosures have at least one.
• Disk drives should be installed in vertical columns within the disk enclosures. Add drives vertically
in multiples of eight, completely filling columns if possible. Disk groups are more robust if filled
with the same number of disk drives in each enclosure. See
NOTE:
When adding multiple disk drives, add a disk and wait for its activity indicator (1) to stop flashing
(up to 90 seconds) before installing the next disk (see
avoid unexpected EVA system behavior.
Figure 6 Disk drive activity indicator

Creating disk groups

The new disks you add will typically be used to create new disk groups. Although you cannot select
which disks will be part of a disk group, you can control this by building the disk groups sequentially.
Add the disk drives required for the first disk group, and then create a disk group using these disk
drives. Now add the disk drives for the second disk group, and then create that disk group. This
process gives you control over which disk drives are included in each disk group.
sequential building of vertical disk groups.
46 Enterprise Virtual Array operation
Figure 7 for an example.
Figure 6). This procedure must be followed to
Figure 7 shows the