Keep old Equallogic PS100 running

J

jpochedl

Limp Gawd
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Jun 7, 2004
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As the title states, I have an Equallogic PS100 iSCSI array that I need to keep running (for at least a few more months before I can officially retire it). The array's no longer supported by Dell, so I can't get parts through them anymore.

Fortunately, the only thing wrong is that I have a failed drive, the first drive that's failed since Dell dropped support on the unit. The warm spare kicked in and rebuilt the RAID set and all's good at the moment except that I'm now short one warm spare...

So, the question I have is whether I can take an off the shelf drive and drop it in...? I've seen others who've replaced all the drives and only had to suffer the warnings in the config web pages about unsupported drives... However, has anyone replaced just one drive with an "unsupported" drive? Can I mix drives and not suffer ill effects? Obviously I'm not asking for anyone to guarantee that an unsupported drive will work, just looking for experience of someone who's done it and had a good, or bad experience.

Right now the unit is actually running a mix of 750 (and one 1TB) Hitachi and Seagate drives, but all of them have Dell's "supported" custom firmware. I'm looking at one of the Seagate Constellation class drives as the temporary replacement ( ST1000NM0033 ).

Experiences, thoughts and opinions welcome. Thanks.
 
I think you are pretty much screwed if you want to use an off the shelf drive. Third party maintenance providers are a good place to procure drives for old systems for pennies on the dollar. Try SMS, Atlantix or Arbitech and see if they have one you can buy.
 
jcrossly: I thought about going to a third party provider to see if I could get a drive from them, but I was hoping to not get something that already had wear and tear on it. If it comes to that though, that's probably the route I'll take.

The drives are going on ebay for about $180 - $200 each, for drives that have an unknown number of hours in service already..... Anybody ever buy used drives off eBay? Is there a process I'd have to run on the drive before I put it into our array? (since it almost certainly had to have come from an active array in its previous life....)

Shockey: It's not just that the system is out of warranty, it's that Dell has discontinued support on the system completely. As soon as you tell Dell the model or serial number of the unit, they say "oh, sorry, we don't have parts for that system anymore" and the discussion just ends. :(

It's not that we didn't know the system was being de-supported, but we decided instead of migrating to another Dell Equallogic device (the easiest and fastest course of action), that we were doing something completely different (AKA, moving some of the services to the cloud). Of course, that project is taking longer than anticipated so I've got to keep this de-supported hardware running in the mean-time.....
 
OP, if the unit is scheduled for retirement in the short term, buy 2 of the used units and run with it.
 
I have to agree, get a couple of used, but know EQL drives for the short term. I understand about being leery of using used drives. I would ask the vendor if the drive was reset. A new drive with a valid RAIDlevel will generate problems on the running system. Depending on FW it could believe there's another LUN in that member and report it as a double faulted RAIDset.

Off the shelf drive/firmware could cause unforeseen problems. It goes in as a spare, so you won't know if it works until there's another failure. Especially if you are running the more vulnerable RAID5 policy.
 
Bah, I've run non-Dell drives in EQL's before. As long as it's an Enterprise drive to begin with, you should be fine. Definitely to be safe, use a used pull, but it's not mandatory.
 
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