HPE ProLiant 380 Gen10 + HPE Smart Array P408i-a SR Gen10 raid1 hdd to ssd swap

Posted by momoffs@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 8 comments

Hey, one of our SAS HDDs(AL14SXB90EE) inside our server is failing, similar or same drives skyrocketed in price and/or are hard to find. I am thinking about switching to SATA SSDs.
my plan is to remove the failing drive, insert SSD, wait for the rebuild and then remove second HDD and rebuild to that one.
our OS drive setup is 2x SAS HDD in raid1.
My question is if this is even supported. mixing hdd/ssd, sata/sas and are there any better workarounds please?

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Casper042@reddit

Smart Array does have a process to migrate from one set of drives to another. I have tested this in our lab and it seems to work great.

BUT, you have 2 problems (well 1 definitely and 1 potential)

1) The Smart Array only supports this live migration when the Source and Destination Drives are the same Protocol. SATA, SAS, etc.

2) The Smart Array only supports this live migration when both Source and Destination drives are online at the same time. So if you have a single 8 drive cage with 6 drives in it, you likely don't have the room to add 6 more drives and do the migration, without jumping through some hoops anyway.

Others in this thread are correct that simply putting in an SSD and hoping the machine will rebuild to it will not work. The controller will prevent this.

If you were to source SAS SSDs instead of SATA, and being I now see only 2 drives for boot, it would be easily doable using the online migration method.

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Casper042@reddit

AL14SXB90EE

PS /u/momoffs If you send me your serial number (DM if you like) of your server, I can look up the exact drive model you originally bought and give you some creative eBay searches if you want to look into sourcing 1 or 2 spare 900GB drives for the short term.

eBay often has sellers listing either the Assembly Number or the Spare Part number because those are printed directly on the label.
The original Sales PN won't be there because sometimes we have 2 or 3 different sales PNs for the same drive depending on the department selling it.

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whatdoido8383@reddit

No, not supported, you cannot mix SSD's and HDD's in an array.

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momoffs@reddit (OP)

I was looking for this in the controller quickspecs and could not find anything. this one I was scared of but my understanding is that the controller sees those drives, well as drives to store data to, and since mix-and-match sas, sata is supported, and also raid1 building.

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whatdoido8383@reddit

From what I recall you may be able to technically put SAS and SATA into the same controller but not the same array. Same with HHD's and SSD, they can't be in the same array.

Do you have a maintenance contract through HPE? You may want to open a ticket and ask. Everything I recall though you cannot mix and match in an array.

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