Drives

The system supports a range of enterprise-class, nearline-class or flash drives. A drive object represents the physical drive. The system creates this object automatically when a supported drive is detected and a drive ID is assigned.

Only drives sold as system options are supported. These include drives in 2.5 in. (6.35 cm) Small Form Factor (SFF) and 3.5 in. (8.89 cm) Large Form Factor (LFF) sizes.

Drives are installed in the drive slots in the front of the enclosure, and internal RAID software is used to provide redundancy. In addition, each drive has two ports that connect the drive to each canister.

The system supports the following types of drives:

Tier 0 flash: Tier 0 flash drives are high performance flash drives that process read and write operations and provide faster access to data than enterprise or nearline drives.
Tier 1 flash: Tier 1 flash drives are lower-cost flash drives, typically with larger capacities, but slightly lower performance and write endurance characteristics. As these drives are used, the system monitors their wear level and issues warnings when the drive is nearing replacement.
Enterprise disks: Enterprise disks are disk drives that are optimized for performance.
Nearline disks: Nearline disks are disk drives that are optimized for capacity.

When a drive is moved between drive slots, the drive ID is maintained unless its Use property is Unused. The Use attribute, which is specified on the chdrive command, determines if the drive can be formed into an array.

Note: Do not replace a drive unless the drive fault LED is on or you are instructed to do so by a fix procedure.