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We have a PS4000 that came with 8 drives. We have bought an additional 8 drives from Dell to fully populate the SAN but I can't find any information to confirm that it's as simple as just popping them...

Documentation at https://support.equallogic.com/support/download_file.aspx?id=741 refers to a two minute delay before initialisation when you insert additional drives but doesn't have much more to say on the issue. Am I missing something obvious?

Matthew
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My theory is that when you're paying $50K for a SAN, the support personnel are there to authoritatively answer questions such as these. And Equallogic support has always been pretty darn good about questions such as these, though I've never expanded an Equallogic, the ones we had were fully populated. We did ask them things related to double-checking our firmware upgrade procedures, cabling and installation, and they always got good answers to us.

Sean Reifschneider
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  • Perhaps it was an isolated case but our one previous experience with Equallogic support was less than stellar, took the best part of six hours and numerous calls back and forth for a simple password reset... In their defence I think it had a fair bit to do with the time difference. Thanks for the advice though, might be worth giving them another shot next time we have an issue! :) – Matthew Sep 27 '11 at 22:48
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I have personally done this with a ps4000, so long as the disks are the same as the other 8 it is literally a case of pulling out the empty caddys and putting the new disks in while live. As soon as you fill the rest of the slots the array will start rebuilding across the new disks. N.B. if you don't already have a UPS attached it is a good idea to do so before doing this, in theory you could survive a power outage during a raid expansion but I wouldn't push your luck!

Alex Berry
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