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.
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 a drive block size of 512 bytes. Drives with different block sizes cannot be used in arrays or as hot-spare drives. You can format these drives to the correct block size. Formatting the drive erases the data that was previously written to the drive and causes the drive to be offline temporarily.
When a drive is moved between drive slots, the drive ID is maintained unless its Use property is Unused. The Use attribute determines if the drive can be formed into an array.