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We have a PS6010 which is just out of its support contract. We are looking to give it another lease on life so would like to replace all the drives with new ones.

It currently has 16x ST3450856SS/ST3450857SS SAS drives but with EQL firmware (i.e. originals from Dell).

If we were to purchase these drives with the same model number but not from Dell, would they work? Even though they don't have EQL firmware on them?

The firmware on these disks is XQH7 whereas the ones we are looking at would be standard firmware not specific to EQL.

Steve
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  • Some Dell devices will work with non dell drives but loose features like health monitoring. Some just refuse to use the drives. So even if you do try it with non dell drives check if it monitors their health properly. Not being notified about impending disk failures is bad. – Grant Nov 17 '14 at 03:48

5 Answers5

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Non-Dell drives are not supported in Equallogic storage arrays.

  • In the best case, the array will warn you about the presence of non-approved disks with a "One or more array drives are not approved" error, and possibly function.
  • In the worst case, the array will reject the disks completely.

Could you instead try finding approved disks through another channel? (never pay retail)

Perhaps renewing support is an option?

ewwhite
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ewwhite is spot on. I've seen PLENTY of systems running with non-Dell drives in them, but the FW on the Dell drives in those arrays is actually EQL-specific firmware (not the same FW used for the exact same drive model in Dell servers).

I would even recommend buying batches of USED EQL drives online before resorting to non-Dell drives purchased new for a lower price, unless this is going to be for non-production data (in which case, why not just try it out?).

If you want to test some drives out, I believe that you might be able to get the system to initialize and create configuration on as few as 4 drives - maybe even 1 if you want to give it a try. I've seen a raid LUN with 4 drives functioning (with all others mistakenly listed as spares), but 1-drive setups I've only seen when there have been major disk problems screwing up the RAID config.

JimNim
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This is not recommended and is very likely to not work. Non-EqualLogic drives will be seen by the array as 'Not approved'.

EQLGuy
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Dell will always ask for a prod SAN to have a service on it.

Have said that, I seen it work on a PS4000 and a PS4100 to have generic HDD in it (they changed all in once), but the SAN was for labbing. Did I told it, LAB.

The firmware and SAN version allow the SAN to make more advanced feature. Like I was told, in 5.2 update the SAN start a HDD snapshot to another drive before a fail, to prevent long rebuild time.. it's only one feature I got told.. So it's saying bye-bye to your SAN resilience and force IMO if it work.

Did I told it, for LAB only ? :)

yagmoth555
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I have a Dell EqualLogic PS6000 we use in production as a secondary backup store. We have 8x Dell ST32000644NS drives in the system, we replaced one drive with a Seagate Constellation ES ST32000644NS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5. This is the same spec drive and still we get the warning "one or more drives in the array are not approved".

Wayne
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