Administrator Guide

the failed drive. The dedicated hot spare remains inactive until it is called upon to replace a failed drive. This scenario is

usually encountered when a faulty data drive is replaced. The hot spare can act as replacement for both internal

mirrored drives and the RAID 6 drive arrays.

Figure 1. DR Series System Drive Slot Locations

Drive 0 (top) Drive 3 (top) Drive 6 (top) Drive 9 (top)

Drive 1 (middle) Drive 4 (middle) Drive 7 (middle) Drive 10 (middle)

Drive 2 (bottom) Drive 5 (bottom) Drive 8 (bottom) Drive 11 (bottom)

DR Series Expansion Shelf

The DR Series hardware system appliance supports the installation and connection of Dell PowerVault MD1200 (for

DR4000, DR4100, and DR6000) and Dell PowerVault MD1400 (for DR4300e, DR4300, and DR6300 systems) data storage

expansion shelf enclosures. Each expansion shelf contains 12 physical disks in an enclosure, which provides additional

data storage capacity for the basic DR Series system. The supported data storage expansion shelves can be added in a

variety of capacities based on your DR Series system version; for details, see the

Dell DR Series System Interoperability

Guide

The physical disks in each expansion shelf are required to be Dell-certified Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives, and the

physical drives in the expansion shelf uses slots 1–11 configured as RAID 6, with slot 0 being a global hot spare (GHS).

When being configured, the first expansion shelf is identified as Enclosure 1 (in the case where two enclosures are

added, these would be Enclosure 1 and Enclosure 2). Adding an expansion shelf to support the DR Series system

requires a license. For more information, see the topic, “Expansion Shelf Licenses.”

NOTE: The 300 Gigabyte (GB) drive capacity (2.7 TB) version of the DR Series system does not support the addition

of expansion shelf enclosures.

NOTE: If you are running a DR Series system with an installed release of system software prior to 2.1, and you

intend to upgrade to release 3.x system software and add an external expansion shelf (or shelves), Dell

recommends that you observe the following best practice sequence of operations to avoid any issues:

• Upgrade the DR Series system with the release 3.x system software

• Power off the DR Series system

• Connect the external expansion shelf (or shelves) with cabling to the DR Series system

• Power on the external expansion shelf (or shelves)

• Power on the DR Series system

NOTE: If you install an expansion shelf enclosure to support a DR Series system, each shelf must use physical

disks that have a capacity equal to or greater than each DR Series system internal drive slot capacity (0–11) that

they are supporting.