Hardware Installation
PixelStor 300e Hardware Installation Manual
Rev. 1, May 2013
2-10
Disk Roaming:
The PixelStor 300e has the unique capability of allowing disk groups and their properties to roam
with the drives. The user can physically remove the drives that make up a disk group and install
in different locations within the same array or in a different array and the system will recognize the
disk group configuration including the RAID volume.
Masking and host information are contained in the controller. You will need to reconfigure the
masking and host information if you move the disk group to a new controller, as in moving the disk
group to a new chassis.
Disk roaming is possible because when a disk group is created, the system automatically creates
a small 128MB partition on each drive. This partition contains the disk group configuration. In this
way, all the information regarding a disk group can be recognized by any PixelStor 5000 controller
during the automatic boot up discovery or during a manual discovery using the PIXELSTOR
Storage Manager or CLI.
The drives can be reinserted in different slots and they can be rediscovered while the system is
on-line. You can take advantage of this flexibility to arrange your storage for different on-line and
off-line tasks. This feature provides a basic and inexpensive way to upgrade a system and retain
your data or move drives to another system for basic system recovery.
Disk Orphans:
If some of the drives from a disk group are not re-inserted or a drive from the disk group goes bad
and is not reconstructed before it roams to a new system, the system will not be able to discover
the disk group. It will know that one or more drives are missing and will designate the drives in the
incomplete disk group as orphans. The data in the incomplete set is maintained, however user
intervention is required to reset the drives. This ensures that the data on the remaining drives is
not overwritten. If the drives are designated as orphans, the user has the following options:
Complete the Set
– You can track down the remaining drives from the disk group, insert
them in any order into the same PixelStor 5000/300e enclosure and use the PixelStor
Storage Manager to do a discovery. Once the whole set is discovered, the disk group will be
All drives in a DG needed for automatic boot up and discovery need to be present for
the disk group discovery to take place. A disk group with one missing member can be
forced online using the PIXELSTOR Storage Manager or CLI discovery command.