Daniel,
I know Bruce has answered this already, but here's some more detail.
If you don't erase the disk labels, when you add the disks back in, you will need to use 'raid swap' before adding each disk, and then 'raid add'.
If you erase the labels, then when you want to add the disks again, you should be able to plug all the disks in (with the system down) and reboot, then do the 'raid add's. Or you could use 'raid swap' as above (avoiding a reboot). But it seems to me that this is making more work for yourself!
At 18:00 05/10/97 -0700, you wrote:
We recently purchased an F630 system with 26 9GB drives (two shelf pairs of 13 drives).
Because multiple RAID groups (and to a less extent, multiple filesystems) are not supported, I have concerns about bringing a 200GB filesystem into the world. All of the space won't be needed for at least several months. The main problems brought on by large filesystems and are backup dataset size (and time), but the biggest concern is that when a disk goes, the raid reconstruction affects more of your data if you have a single RAID group. (As well as worse fault tolerance, etc.)
And since we can add new drives by swapping them in, it doesn't seem like it would hurt to only bring 13 drives online at first. Since we have an active filesystem, can someone tell me what the best route to do this is? Any caveats?
I have had one report from someone at NetApp that I should erase disk labels (I don't know if he meant all of them, just the ones being removed, or the ones staying) before starting, and another that it would be fine to just yank the disks I don't want and newfs the remaining ones.
Dan
Thanks and best regards,
Andrew Bond Network Appliance Systems Engineer South House 3, Bond Avenue, Milton Keynes, MK1 1SW tel: +44 (0)1908-646688 fax: +44 (0)1908-645996 mobile: +44 (0)468-425236 http://www.netapp.com