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DIY SAN storage capacity upgrade?
Hello all,
I’ve got two Active Storage SANs with 10TB capacities. I really want to upgrade them (remove 1TB drives and use 3 or 4TB drives) to upgrade storage capacity.
I’m not too knowledgeable in this area (SANs specifically, I’ve built plenty of RAIDs, just never with an MDC involved).
When I ask Active about it they want me to buy new units with more storage from them. That’ll be more expensive than me buying new drives. If I were to buy new drives and RAID them, would the MDC see the change in capacity and everything would be okay?Thanks,
Phillip -
5 Replies
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how many people have tried to help you so far ?
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
Hey Bob,
I haven’t had any responses yet. I’ve spoken with a couple people from Active, but they won’t offer any direction other than the purchase of a new system.
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Phillip,
Feel free to reach out to me directly. The company I work for, Chesapeake Systems, may be able to figure something out as far as swapping the drives out. I would imagine that possibly since your unit may be older that the MDCs may not support the larger capacity drives, hence their suggestion of purchasing a new unit.
But Active may be right that you won’t be able to upgrade the drives and you would have to purchase a new system. Feel free to message me on here and I can see what I can figure out for you.
Jessica Muth
jmuth01@gmail.com -
I think on the older active san’s the backplate on each of the drive sleds are only capable of handling up to 2TB .. which is double of what you currently have.. however if you filled out all 16 sleds..you’d have 32TB of storage (minus the drive format info that eats up some space and a spare for Raid 5 and maybe another for a hot swap spare.. so maybe 26ish
If you have an M-raid. those are the newer models and those can handle the 4TB drives..
Which to you own..
also remember that when you replace the drive.. and start fresh.. it’s a new drive and nothing is migrated off the old drives. so make sure you create a backup before you start.
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Thanks for the info Chris! Even if I’m limited to 2TB drives, that’s still a fair upgrade. I’ll have to do a little investigation to figure out if this is an M-raid or not. I came on about a year ago and the system predates me. We’ve got all the data backed up a couple times in different places as well, so there definitely won’t be any data lost, but thanks for the reminder!
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