Hitachi SMS 100 drive replacement

[jezi55]

I have a really old San with 2 dead drives, this is not a production SAN as we have a hp and Intel cluster. I was looking at getting this old SAN working and using it for additional backups. I am very new to this and have managed to access the San via a management console on a laptop.

 

In the Hitachi documentation it says that when a drive fails you need to put a replacement drive in the recovery bay and it will rebuild from there and make the problem drive redundant. When 3 drives fail you need to replace the whole unit...

 

I have no recovery hard drives and was wondering if I replaced these with working ones and factory reset the SAN would it be back to full working order with the option for 2 drives to fail or shall I just write this one off?

[3s-gtech]

Surely that's just a poorly written instruction - it would just write the data off in that array, rather than the hardware. That is, unless it's not possible to reconfigure the arrays at all, but that seems unlikely. What disks does it use?

[MrEprise]

I briefly looked at the manual as well as a couple of reviews for the unit; as I understand it, there are 12 front-facing bays + 2 internal bays. The 2 internal and 10 of the 12 front bays are populated and sealed off and are not designed to be removed/replaced by the user (of course there are ways and means but this would invalidate any warranty it might have.) Should 1 or 2 drives fail, you're supposed to populate the recovery bays with disks which will rebuild the array and provide you with temporary access to the data to allow you to recover it before sending the unit back to Hitachi for drive replacement.

 

Since this is the case, it's probably better to write this off and purchase a unit which will allow user-replaceable drives. You could probably do it with the Hitachi unit, but you'd run the risk of losing the software that runs on it (assuming they do the same as Buffalo and stick it over a bunch of the disks.)

[jezi55]

Thanks all for the reply, I have taken the front off and can see 9 drives plus the 2 recovery bays. When I go to the IP of the SAN it says bays 1 and 5 are broken and that I need to insert drives into the recovery bays. The discs come out really easy (just use a screwdriver to push the black latch and it slides out). I've found the drives for about £20 on eBay so might just buy them take out the 2 dead drives and reset the array from scratch. Then theoretically if 2 others die I can use the recovery bay to rebuild... just was asking if anyone had any experience in the past

[jezi55]

Here is a picture