NSE Drives on non encrypted FAS

[BrianA]

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?

[andris · Accepted solution]

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

[AlexDawson]

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.

[marcinmf]

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?

[andris]

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