Solved! Can I change 6gb speed 1TB hot swap SAS drives for 12gb speed drives on the fly?

Entec-DGC

Junior Member
Sep 23, 2019
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I want to try and improve the disk access speed of our HP DL380 G9 server. We have a RAID-5 array with 4 x 1TB drives (giving 3TB total). So that I don't have to take our main production server down, I wanted to replace a 6gb drive with a 12gb one, let the array rebuild, then do the same for one of the other 4 drives, let it rebuild, and so on and so forth until all 4 are changed and rebuilt. Is this possible, I'm assuming whilst the 6gb's are mixed with the 12gb's, the array will only work at 6gb, however as soon as all four are changed, the array will start working at 12gb. Correct?
 

ch33zw1z

Lifer
Nov 4, 2004
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Does the server have 12gb SAS controller, cables, and backplane? If not, won't matter anyways.

Edit: also, are you experiencing server performance issues that are related to the 6gb bus being saturated? If so, do you also have write cache enabled / installed on the controller?

If your answer is no to either of these, don't bother changing a production device, save the $ for the inevitable upgrade
 
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Entec-DGC

Junior Member
Sep 23, 2019
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Does the server have 12gb SAS controller, cables, and backplane? If not, won't matter anyways.

Edit: also, are you experiencing server performance issues that are related to the 6gb bus being saturated?

If your answer is no to either of these, don't bother changing a production device, save the $ for the inevitable upgrade

Hello

Thanks for the reply.

The array controller is a HP Smart Array P440ar. If I look at the specifications, it says '12 Gb/s per physical link supported'.
 

ch33zw1z

Lifer
Nov 4, 2004
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It's an HPE Proliant DL380 G9 dual Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3 CPU's and 128GB RAM.

Umm...SAS cabling and backplane...which will all need to support 12gb SAS

Also, please reread my previous post as it was edited. A production machine? Change only when needed, not wanted.
 

rsutoratosu

Platinum Member
Feb 18, 2011
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I dont remember off hand but I believe once you take a drive out, your new drive may or may not automatically rebuild. Rebuild is tricky, sometimes its not automatic. Do you have extra bays open ? I had instances where I need to put a drive in and label it as hot spare and once a failed drive is detected, it'll go over to the hot spare. It wasn't like I plug a drive into the same bay and it'll rebuild.

get your ilo info, you'll need to login it and read the status and make sure it's actually rebuilding.. worse case is rebooting after hours and go into the smart array bios.
 

Entec-DGC

Junior Member
Sep 23, 2019
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Thanks for all the replies. I changed all 4 drives eventually, allowing the RAID to rebuild before replacing the next one, and it worked. The whole array is now on 12Gbs as apposed to 6 Gbps. Hope this helps others.

Thanks.