Drives

Replacing a Drive

Press the Replace button on the Drives page to replace a drive. When selecting the replacement drive you must choose a drive that will not break the RAID Group redundancy (i.e. you cannot have two or more drives from the same Storage Node in a RAID Group). If you select a drive that has a different type or larger size than the other drives in the RAID Group, you will see a warning, but you can continue the operation.

You can replace a drive in any RAID Group whether the drive is healthy (Normal) or unhealthy (Failed).

You cannot replace a drive if the RAID Group is in a Resyncing state.


Shredding a Drive

Shredding is the process of erasing the data on a drive for security and privacy reasons by overwriting the entire drive with random data at least three times. Typically you will shred a drive before returning it to the Zadara Cloud or before deleting your VPSA.

You can only perform Shred on drives in Available status (i.e. not in a RAID group).

The Shredding progress appears in the drive status as “Shredding X%” .

You cannot remove a drive from a VPSA while it is being shredded. You need to either cancel the operation by pressing the Cancel Shred button, or wait until shredding is completed.

Caution

Shredding is irreversible!


Viewing Drive properties

You can view the following properties and metering information in the Drives Details South Panel tabs:

Properties

Each drive displays the following Properties:

Property

Description

ID

An internally assigned unique ID.

Name

Drive name.

Capacity

Drive Capacity in MB.

Storage Node

The name of the Storage Node where the drive is physically located.

Type

SATA, SAS, or SSD

Status

The drive’s status reflects the drive health as sensed by the Storage Node and by the VPSA RAID logic:

  • Available – The drive is healthy and free.

  • Normal – The drive is healthy and belongs to a RAID Group.

  • Absent – No access to the drive.

  • Failed – The Storage Node has reported failure accessing the drive.

  • Faulty – The VPSA RAID object has failed writing to or reading from this drive.

  • Recover Pending – The RAID Group has failed and the drive is awaiting recovery.

  • Shredding – The drive is being shredded.

RAID Group

Name of the RAID group that contains this drive.

Protection Zone

Displays the Protection Zone of the drive.

Usage

In-use or Available

Added

The date and time when the drive was added to the VPSA.

Modified

The date and time when the Drive object was last modified.

Metering

The Metering Charts provide live metering of the IO workload associated with the selected Drive.

The charts display the metering data as it was captured in the past 20 “Intervals.” An interval length can be set to one of the following: 1 second, 10 Seconds, 1 Minute, 10 Minutes, or 1 Hour. The Auto button lets you see continuously-updating live metering info (refreshed every 3 sec).

The Following charts are displayed:

Chart

Description

IOPs

The number of read and write SCSI commands issued to the Drive, per second.

Bandwidth (MB\s)

Total throughput (in MB) of read and write SCSI commands issued to the Drive, per second.

IO Time (ms)

Average response time of all read and write SCSI commands issued to the Drive, per selected interval.

Logs

Displays all event logs associated with this Drive.