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Question on installing a new 6tb drive into a 3u server

E

eldosebabu

Active member
Hello

I tried replacing a 2 tb drive with a 6tb drive (for additional hard disk space) via the force fail method in my 3u server and once powered back on, the server would switch on but do nothing else for a long time. The power button wouldn't switch off either. Later upon removing the 6tb drive and putting back the old drive, the 3u server works fine now. I'm confused. Please advice.
 
Ok I seem to have answered my own question. I guess it needs to be done in steps. First replace the hot spare with the larger drive. Then once the system accepts it, power down and replace the old drive with another new larger capacity disk. Am I on the right track?
 
I have never power cycled my 3U server when doing forced fail upgrades. I just remove a drive and wait about 10 seconds for the hot spare to begin rebuilding. (It will switch from having a blinking light to a solid light) and then I insert the new drive, which becomes the new hot spare. I already had one 6TB drive in as the hot spare when I started this process. I am now about half way through my 3U server at roughly 6 days per drive.
 
I would strongly recommend that you contact our support team. If you make a wrong step here, you could lose all of the data on your system.
 
I am working with my AV folks on obtaining a grandfathered system and we discovered one of their servers could not be upgraded to the new 6TB drives. Do we know which previous models of servers can be upgraded to the 6TB drives and which can not? That would be important to know.

Thanks,
 
I thought all of them could, aside from the old 5u server and the cinema one ache of high are limited to 1tb drives.
 
Mr. Poindexter is correct. The 6TB disk cartridges will work in any 1U or 3U Premiere server. They are not usable in 5U and original Cinema One servers (both of which use a completely different drive form factor).
 
Hello all,

One of our support engineers suggested that I add a bit of clarification here.

Expanding system storage by removing an existing RAID drive and replacing it with a larger one is a risky operation. When you remove and replace a drive, the information that was on the old drive has to be reconstituted on the new drive. To do that, the RAID has to read every sector of every hard drive. This is a much greater read load than is placed on the drives in normal operation.

As drives age, they become more susceptible to failure, and the additional strain of all of that activity could push a marginal drive over the edge. If a drive fails during a RAID rebuild, when the array (by definition) lacks protection, then all data on the array can be lost.

The safest way to move to larger drives is to make the move all at once to a new disk set that is made up of larger drives. This is done by replicating the information from your existing server. Some people choose this opportunity to replace their server as well (and we do offer trade-in credit), or some dealers will offer the temporary use of one of their servers to hold the replacement disk set during replication. We can also perform a replication for you, for a fee, if you don't have access to a suitable second server.

Let's say for example that you had a fully populated 3U server with 14 750GB drives. The capacity of that system is 9TB. You could upgrade to a disk set comprising five 6TB drives, which would have a capacity of 18TB (3x6TB, plus parity disk, plus hot spare). That would double your capacity and leave the system with plenty of storage expansion capability down the road by simply inserting new drives.

So, to summarize, expansion of your system capacity by piecemeal replacement of drives is possible, but not recommended.
 
Mike, that works very well for doing a migration of 750TB drives, but my 3U server had 14 x 4TB, so I had 48TB of storage once the hot spare and parity drive were taken out. Doing a replication of that would have required 48 days to pull the content from server #1 over to the new array. Once finished, I would then be able to put the array from my other server in its place and that was 16TB and would take 16 days to replicate that.

In total, I would have been replicating for 64 days with a good amount of content off-line for two months.

Doing a force fail upgrade of my first server was an 81 day process but I wouldn't have any content go offline until I finished that and then it was only 16 days for the replication from server #2.

There really needs to be a faster way to copy content over for upsizing arrays, although it feels like I am at my peak Premier system storage now, given the migration of store purchased material to the Encore line in a couple months. Still, a replication of a fully loaded 3U server with today's top drives is a whopping 72 day process!

I don't like putting my array at risk, but given that I have newer drives, I am a bit more comfortable with it. It just seems like you should be able to have a special server at your HQ that can clone a K-scape drive into a larger one and be able to run that up to 14 times concurrently, which could cut the drive upsize time down by as much as 90%.
 
Definitely understand what you're saying, but I wanted to make it clear to folks here who are not experts that upgrading by replacing one drive at a time carries an added risk of data loss, and we don't recommend it for that reason.

I'm sorry I'm not a filesystem expert, so I don't know whether a parallel duplication scheme such as you've proposed is feasible or not.
 
Has anyone ever attempted to use one of those $99 hard drive clone tools? In theory they should work just as well, and faster, as they just make a bit-wise clone from source to target, and don't care about filesystem.

The only limiting factor would be if this caused the disk being unreadable, due to the system maybe expecting to find a serial number somewhere on the partition. I would however assume that a serial number would be stored in firmware, rather than on disk; that's how I would design it if it was me.
 
I have not tried that, but do those cloning tools assume a particular disc format or only work with known disc formats?
 
Mr.Poindexter said:
I have not tried that, but do those cloning tools assume a particular disc format or only work with known disc formats?
Click to expand...

All of the hardware disk cloning tools I know off are pretty dumb, and therefor filesystem agnostic.

This is also the reason they usually can't copy to a target disk with lower capacity then the source disk, regardless of the used space of the partition actually being within the target capacity.

Essentially all they do is make a shallow copy of each sector from start to finish, and once they reach the last sector of the source, they simply stop writing.

This is why I believe it could work, and prove a very safe way to clone data.
Given that the security mechanism of the disks allow this, as I mentioned earlier.
 
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