Manual

Adding disk driv
es to the storage system
As your storage requirements grow, you may be adding disk drives to your storage system. Adding new
disk drives is the easiest way to incre ase the storage capacity of the storage system. Disk drives can be
added online without impacting storage system operation.
Guidelines for adding disk drives
When adding new disk drives to the storage system, you should ensure that the disk drives are installed
in the correct positions to maintain availability. The disk drives should be distributed across the d isk
enclosures to protect ag ainst the failure of a s ingle disk enclosure.
Use the following guidelines when adding disk drives to your storage system:
• Install high p er formance and FATA disk drives in separate groups. These different d rive types must
be in separate d isk groups. You may also want to consider sepa rating different drive capacities
and spindle speeds into different groups.
• Thediskdrivesshouldbedistributedevenlyacrossthediskenclosures.Thenumberofdisksof
a given t ype in each enclosure should not differ by more than one. For example, no enclosure
should have two disks until all the other enclosures have at least one.
• Disk d rives should be installed in vertical c olum ns within the disk enclosures. Add drives vertically
in multiples of eight, completely fi lling columns if possible. Disk groups are more robust if filled
with the same number of disk drives in each enclosure. See Figure 6 for an example.
NOTE:
When adding multiple d isk drives, add a disk and wait for its activity indicator (1) to stop flashing
(up to 90 seconds) befor e installing the next disk (see Figure 5). Thisproceduremustbefollowedto
avoidunexpectedEVAsystembehavior.
Figure 5 Disk drive activity indicator
Creating disk groups
Thenewdisksyouaddwilltypicallybeusedtocreatenewdiskgroups.Althoughyoucannotselect
which disks will be part of a disk group, you can control this by building the disk groups sequentially.
Add the disk drives required for the first disk g roup, and then create a disk group using these disk drives.
Now ad d the disk drives for the second disk group, and then create that disk group. This process gives
you control over which disk drives are included in each disk group. Figure 6 shows the sequential
building of vertical disk groups.
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Enterprise Virtual Array operation