ONTAP Hardware

Disk replacement for a FAS2554

Jmansfield
6,025 Views

Good morning everyone, 

 

I have been tasked with looking into expanding the drive space on our FAS2554 storage unit as we are currently running low. 

 

Currently we have 2 shelves with 40 HDD disks and 8 SSD disks.

 

The 40 HDD disks are each 2 TB in size BSAS drives. 

The 8 SSD are 272.37GB hard drives

 

Looking at the Netapp Hardware Universe page for our FAS2554 unit, I was able to see the following models for a 3TB and 4TB replacement. 

 

X477A-R6 - 4TB NL-SAS

X336A-R6 - 4TB NL-SAS

X308A-R5 - 3TB SATA

 

1. Will the hard drives above work as sutible upgrades? 

2. Will we have to purchase all 40 of the hard drives in one go to fully utilize the extra space we will be obtaining? Or can we purchase them in groupings of 5 and be able to utilize the extra space?

3. Would the upgrade of the hard drives be similiar in process of replacing a failed hard drive in a RAID setting? 

 

Let me know if you need any additiontal information to answer the questions above as well and thank you in advance! 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

AndreUnterberg
6,003 Views

Hi Jmansfield,

 

the harddrives you mentioned will NOT work as subtile Upgrades. The diskspace will be downsized to fit the size of the existing disks in the aggregate.

You do not need to replace in groupings of 5 or so.  You will only get the whole space available when all disks of an aggregate are swapped.

 

Its a very long procedure, to swap every disk, wait until rebuild, swap next and so on.

 

I would recommend to purchase a new Diskshelf with new disks. So you dont have to throw away the 2TB Drives.

 

Kind regards

Andre

 

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4 REPLIES 4

AndreUnterberg
6,004 Views

Hi Jmansfield,

 

the harddrives you mentioned will NOT work as subtile Upgrades. The diskspace will be downsized to fit the size of the existing disks in the aggregate.

You do not need to replace in groupings of 5 or so.  You will only get the whole space available when all disks of an aggregate are swapped.

 

Its a very long procedure, to swap every disk, wait until rebuild, swap next and so on.

 

I would recommend to purchase a new Diskshelf with new disks. So you dont have to throw away the 2TB Drives.

 

Kind regards

Andre

 

aborzenkov
5,946 Views

@AndreUnterberg wrote:

You will only get the whole space available when all disks of an aggregate are swapped.


That's new to me. I was grown to believe that it is impossible to grow aggregate by replacing disks. Just to be sure, have you done it or this is your expectation?

AndreUnterberg
5,906 Views

HI aborzenkov,

 

I´ve done it several times. When you add a larger disk to an aggregate it will be downsized to fit the old disks. The reason for that is parity and spare. If the new (larger disk) fails, the old (smaller) disks aren´t able to replace it.
How should a 2TB HDD replace a 3TB ? So for the 3TB HDD is downsized to 2TB. As long you have at least one of the 2TB HDDs in the aggregate all 3TB HDDs are downsized. Because no one can guess which HDD might become faulty.

 

kind regards

 

Andre

 

 

SpindleNinja
5,880 Views

 

Just changing the disk out on an existing RAID Group will just resize and rebuild  them to what the existing raid group.   

It's best to just add shelves with disk and create new aggrs.   

 

You CAN technically mix raid groups of different sizes inside of an aggr, but not recomened.  e.g.   have a RG of 2TB disks and a RG of 3TB disks.   But simply swaping out disks won't grow the aggr. 

 

 There is tech out there that allows this, however it's slow and I would never use it for production systems.  

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