Upgrading 250GB drives to 750GB drives

Question

We have an XServe RAID that is a few years old. It has 8 drive modules with 250GB drives and 6 blanks. We'd like to upgrade all available slots to 750GB drives.
Can I fill the blanks with 750GB drive modules and fill the existing modules with new 750GB drives and rebuild from there? I have read that I need to update the firmware to recognize the larger capacity. What about the controller module and fiber card. Will it work with the existing pieces or will I need to upgrade those as well?
Any other suggestions are welcome.
Thanks!
Stephe.
XServe G5 and Intel
6 Cluster Nodes
2 RAIDS
Bunch o' G5s and Mac Pros
HD Video, 3D Animation and Web Production House

Answer 1

Camelot wrote:
Any advice on types and brands for the drives?
Apple.
Apple doesn't manufacture drives. Last I checked only Seagate makes 750GB PATA drives, everyone else in the business seems to make only SATA drives that size or bigger.
Unfortunately nobody makes 1TB drives that are PATA, so it looks like the current crop of the drives mean the end of the line for the XServe RAID in terms of capacity.
While I have heard of people who've replaced the bundled drives with larger ones, with some success,
the blank drive bays have simple blanking plates - i.e. do not have the electronics required to actually
support a drive.
Apple do not sell empty drive modules (with the electronics, but no drive), which makes it difficult
to expand the array other than by getting drive modules from Apple.
Correct. However, if you upgrade from a system with 14 250GB drives, you have all the mounting hardware you need, you just have to swap the drives in the carriers.
If you just bought new drive modules for Apple for the current blanks, and opted to manually
upgrade the existing drives on your own you'd end up with mixed drives (vendor, models and
firmware) which, at best, will result in degraded performance.
This has not been an issue in the past. After all, when you have a drive failure, you end up often with different drive models and firmware versions, too. E.g. Hitachi discontinued the 250GB drive model that was originally in the XServe RAID, and replaced it with a different 250GB drive in their line up.
You had no choice but to mix models if a single drive failure required swapping drives. (To make matters worse, the new drive, while faster, was a tiny bit smaller, which really caused head aches!)
Even though the drives sourced from Apple are more expensive than you can find similarly-sized
drives elsewhere, you get server-grade drives, burned in, with known/standard firmware, and
vendor support by taking the Apple route.
Sorry, that's FUD without basis. No drive manufacturer will run a special assembly line for "Apple grade" drives. Worse, you buy a drive module from Apple, and you have at best a 1 year warranty. You buy the drives from Hitachi or Seagate directly, you have a three or five year warranty.
If you try to use the manufacturer's warranty on Apple sourced drives, the manufacturers will not honor it, because the drives are OEM drives sold at a big discount to Apple, which means they don't give any warrantee beyond what Apple gives.
In terms of what you get for the money, both in absolute price, and in terms of warranty, is much better if you get bare drives straight from the manufacturer than going with Apple's drives.
Without knowing your business I can't tell you what to do, but for me I can't bear the thought of
telling my clients that I lost their data because I opted to save $100 on a few hard drives.
If you're selling to clients, of course, Apple drives are better: there's more profit in those, because they are not a commodity like bare bones drives, but a brand-name special order item.
(that's not to say that third-party drives are necessarily less reliable than those sourced from
Apple, more that being able to say you had a problem even though you were using vendor
supported and provided parts goes a long way ).
Apple's support in regards to drives that fail after a year is non-existent, except if you get the $999 AppleCare contract, but that means you can buy quite a few replacement drives to cover that, and it's still only 3 years coverage, vs. 5 years for the drives direct from the manufacturer...
Obviously Apple needs to make a profit, and inventory, logistics, etc. for parts are expensive, so you pay in essence for the convenience of getting a module you can just shove into the unit and be done. No need to mess with screwdrivers, etc.
Ronald