topic Re: NSE Drives on non encrypted FAS in ONTAP Hardware

NSE Drives on non encrypted FAS

BrianA — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 15:17:18 GMT

I have a FAS2552 with non encrypted drives and because of some organization changes I find myself in possession of a unused DS4246 with 24 x 6TB NSE drives.

This tray was never installed on the other FAS2552 that does have encryption. The question is can I install on my FAS2552 understanding that I will never be enabling

the encryption functionality?

Re: NSE Drives on non encrypted FAS

andris — Mon, 27 Mar 2017 21:40:48 GMT

Sorry, but you can't mix the shelves/drives. ONTAP strictly enforces "all NSE drives" or "all non-NSE drives" in an HA pair.

Re: NSE Drives on non encrypted FAS

AlexDawson — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 09:06:37 GMT

To add to andris's great response - the opposite is also true - even if the system does not have encryption turned on, if the drives are encryptable, you can't add non-encryptable drives to it either.

While these two scenarios are sometimes inconvenient, it is required for compliance reasons and to prevent data leakage on encrypted systems by many of our customers.

We have an option in ONTAP 9.1 of NVE - NetApp Volume Encryption - which does software encryption of selected volumes only.

Re: NSE Drives on non encrypted FAS

marcinmf — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 05:14:27 GMT

Hello,

I have a similar question.

Is there a way to convert the NSE drives to unprotected mode per this link https://library.netapp.com/ecmdocs/ECMP1196986/html/GUID-1336E9A5-2ADC-4EB4-95D9-5328DB9A4E56.html

and then use both drive -regular drives and unprotected drives (self-encrypting) in the same HA pair?

Re: NSE Drives on non encrypted FAS

andris — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 23:49:10 GMT

It doesn't matter if you have keys set up or not... you can't mix SED and non-SED drives in an HA pair.

http://docs.netapp.com/ontap-9/topic/com.netapp.doc.pow-nve/GUID-5DD87E19-F311-4B2C-898C-285032E0B116.html